


All Beasts Are Happy

by rexluscus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Divergence - Post-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Complicated Sex-Repulsed Issues, Don't copy to another site, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Remus Lupin Lives, Self-Hatred, Severus Snape Lives, Severus Snape Smokes, Suicide Attempt, Virgin Severus Snape
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:14:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22899436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexluscus/pseuds/rexluscus
Summary: Snape has survived the war, and it's no longer his job to keep Harry Potter alive—until suddenly it is, and the threat to Harry is once more his fault. Lupin is on his side, but Lupin has his own problems. Then there are the vengeful Death Eaters, the rogue Dementors, and the teenage savages vandalizing his house.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Severus Snape, Remus Lupin/Severus Snape
Comments: 157
Kudos: 254
Collections: Severus Snape Lives!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> See those tags and summary? We won't get to most of that for a few chapters. In the meantime, enjoy Snape's shitty life.
> 
> (Lupin shows up in chapter two, though, FYI.)
> 
> Thanks immeasurably to Laventadorn, without whom this fic would either suck or not exist.

On most days, Courtroom Ten was as damp and chilly as the bottom of a well, but that morning it had fogged up with the heat of hundreds of bodies packed along the benches and crowded against the public gallery rails, filling the chamber with their humming and rustling like bats on the roof of a cave.

“. . . How then do you explain the accused’s ability to cast a Killing Curse? A spell that requires genuine malice—”

“A common misconception, but the caster of a Killing Curse must merely _intend_ with all their heart to end their victim’s life!”

“Malice, intent, what does it matter?”

“Because my client’s intent was not to harm Professor Dumbledore but to spare him pain and see his plans against Lord Voldemort carried out!”

The advocate for the defense paused in his pacing to deliver this last remark, flinging his arms up in theatrical frustration.

Severus leaned his cheek on his hand—or tried to, at least. When the chains around his wrist yanked him up short, he set his hand down slowly, hoping to look like he’d been stretching.

His advocate—Durbly or something, Severus hadn’t been listening—wore satin robes the color of an unripe banana, and his tied-back chestnut hair ended in a single, perfect corkscrew curl that bounced every time he moved. Severus couldn’t take his eyes off it. In his imagination, it made a _boing, boing _sound, like one of those toys Lily had played with and Petunia had broken.

The men before him argued on.

Elphias Doge, high above on the Chief Warlock’s bench, waved the advocate’s words away. “You cannot prove the intentions of the accused merely by the consequences of his actions. After all, he may only have _accidentally_ contributed to Voldemort’s defeat. Who’s to say—”

The advocate’s exasperated huff sounded less feigned this time. “If you will not be swayed by the testimony of Albus Dumbledore himself, I must wonder what standard of evidence _would _satisfy you!”

_Boing, boing. _The curl went into an ecstasy of flouncing.

He and Lily had sat at the top of the concrete steps and Lily had made the toy walk down to the bottom, like a bedspring possessed by a tiny poltergeist. Muggle magic, she’d said. Severus hadn’t been impressed. But he’d thrilled at her laugh of delight as she ran down to collect the thing and ferry it back to the top, cradled in her hands like a little pet.

Doge and Mr. Durbly were arguing about standards of evidence. When you hired an expensive lawyer (not that Severus had; apparently an anonymous benefactor was insisting) this was what you were paying for: instead of marching you in, interrupting all your pleas for mercy and convicting you with no discussion, they sat you down for days and days while they discussed the finer points of Wizarding jurisprudence, and _then _they convicted you.

Earlier that morning, Shacklebolt had informed him that his was the longest-running trial in Wizengamot history since Linus the Loquacious had defended himself for five days straight in 1792, and Severus had no interest in beating the record. His head was pounding. He hadn’t slept for more than two hours at a time in weeks; one didn’t sleep in Azkaban so much as sink into a nightmarish twilight filled with monstrous visions of one’s daytime anxieties and the shrieks of other prisoners. On top of it, he was badly craving a cigarette. He might have agreed to a hundred more nights in Azkaban if only someone would give him a cigarette.

“We’ll certainly need better than the circumstance and hearsay you have submitted these last two days,” said Doge—and truly, Doge was the latest of Severus’s string of bad luck; how had he ended up with Dumbledore’s most devoted friend as his prosecutor? “If you’ve no more arguments to present—_new _arguments, that is—I suggest we proceed to the vote.”

Severus nearly groaned with relief.

But his advocate showed no signs of giving in, despite the patches of desperation showing through his confidence. “What about the testimony of the school itself? Hogwarts has refused to acknowledge an illegitimate headmaster in the past, which, given that my client was installed without the usual legitimizing process, strongly suggests that the school conferred a deeper legitimacy upon him, one based in his loyalty to its late headmaster!”

Doge was squaring his papers as if their business was already finished. “We have been over this,” he said without looking up, “when several members of this council pointed out that Hogwarts has in fact tolerated a number of downright evil headmasters in its days.”

“And what about Professor Dumbledore’s familiar?” The advocate took a brilliant orange feather out of his robes and brandished it aloft. Even without the rest of the bird, Fawkes’s feather lit up the dark stone walls like a shard broken off the sun. Severus had to look away from the sight of it clutched in a stranger’s grubby hand. “This feather from the tail of a phoenix was found at the site of what ought to have been—and according to Mr. Potter’s testimony, in fact _was_—my client’s death. As you know, the phoenix would only have saved my client from his fatal wound if he had demonstrated incredible loyalty to the great man himself!”

Doge waved impatiently, as if hoping to blow the feather out of the advocate’s grasp. “Mr. Dillby,” he said patronizingly—ah yes, _that_ was his name, Severus had been close—“you were unable to prove that this feather came from a phoenix, let alone Dumbledore’s. And even if you had, it proves nothing about the accused’s loyalty—merely that the animal was, for whatever reason, present at the scene.”

Kingsley Shacklebolt, who sat between Doge and Gawain Robards on the high bench, leaned over and said what sounded like “honestly, Elphias!” in an impatient whisper while the other members of the Wizengamot argued among themselves.

Severus swallowed his nausea. “Loyalty”—every mention of the word made an icy patch inside him spread a little farther. Had they bothered to ask, he could have told them what his “loyalty” had looked like. Mr. Dillby’s recent bit of sophistry had been clever but wrong—Severus hadn’t thought about defeating the Dark Lord when he’d killed Dumbledore. He’d thought about how much he hated the old man, and then he’d gone home and wept until he vomited._ Well? _he wanted to ask Dumbledore._ How _damaged_ do you think my soul is now?_

And what would they say if he described how much he’d still missed the hateful old bastard? That he was nothing without a counterfeit father to tell him how to wipe his arse, so desperate to follow orders that he’d let a fucking painting boss him around? Like him, they might wonder—did he get off on it? Had too much time spent bare-arsed over Tobias’s knee twisted him up inside? He might have helped win the war, true. But to call such sickness “loyalty” was grotesque.

“This is going nowhere,” said Doge, returning the court to order. “The very nature of a double agent makes their true allegiance impossible to determine—which leaves us only with the acts themselves.”

Poor Mr. Dillby finally lost his cool. “That the acts themselves were committed is not in doubt!” he roared. “Indeed, we never denied them! Ladies and gentlemen, the question _must _be one of intent—was my client loyal to Voldemort or was he loyal to Albus Dumbledore? However difficult it may be, _that_ is the matter you must judge, and Professor Dumbledore himself has already explained in great detail why my client acted as he did—”

Doge slapped the lectern hard, startling Dillby into silence. “Dumbledore merely said why he _believed_ Snape did what he did! If we had Lord Voldemort before us, he could no doubt paint a very different but equally convincing picture!”

Voices swelled all around. Shacklebolt and Robards were openly arguing with Doge, and the other members of the Wizengamot no longer bothered keeping their discussions to a whisper.

Severus wished he could ask the chains to let him rub his throbbing temples. His eyeballs felt like they’d been left out to dry in the sun. Hadn’t he done all he could to satisfy the world? He’d been “loyal,” he’d obeyed, he’d done everything Dumbledore told him to do. But oh, did he _mean _it? He’d dismantled himself to the foundation, practically stopped being a person for Dumbledore_—_but these people had to know what was in his _heart_. They had to check under the sheets to see if his soul was clean. And if it wasn’t, well, he barely deserved to live, did he?

He wanted to lie down. He wanted his lice-infested bed in Azkaban, wanted to fall asleep to the shrieks of the condemned. He wanted to get on with planning his suicide, a difficult feat now that Azkaban was patrolled by human guards, but not impossible. If nothing else, he could starve or dehydrate himself, an unspeakably painful way to go but he had a savage will—nothing short of a Full Body-Bind could keep him alive if he put his mind to it—

“Mr. Snape!” Doge was giving him a narrow-eyed look that almost suggested concern. The noise had subsided and every gaze in the room was crawling over him. “Are you ill? Do you require a Healer?”

He unclenched his grinding teeth. His lips were trembling, and a cold tear ran down his nose.

“Elphias, perhaps a short recess,” said Shacklebolt.

“No!” Severus jerked his hand toward his face to wipe at the tear, but the chains stopped it, which only made more tears spring up. “Take your vote! Take it! I’ve had enough!”

Dillby gaped at him in shocked betrayal, then spun toward the high bench. “Please disregard my client—he is not in his right mind. If I could beg your patience a little longer, I ask that you consider the precedent set in the 1809 trial of Herbert Hickinbottom, in which a spy for the MLE was accused of . . .”

“If I may,” a mild voice put in, “I might be able to satisfy the court’s doubts once and for all.”

As one, the room turned toward the portrait sitting on an easel in the front row. The seating barrier hid the feet of the easel, so that if one didn’t look closely, one might momentarily think a whimsical soul had mounted an empty picture frame in front of a living Albus Dumbledore. For the last hour, he’d sat absolutely still with a fixed expression of polite interest, and Severus had assumed he’d fallen asleep with his eyes open. Apparently he’d just been waiting for the right moment to intervene.

Severus wasn’t sure why he couldn’t meet the portrait’s eyes. It certainly wasn’t grief—he’d had plenty of time to get sick of the old fool all over again while he hid from the Carrows in his office.

In the hush, Dumbledore went on. “I do understand your resistance, Elphias. You are not satisfied with knowing _how_ Mr. Snape’s actions served my purposes because you cannot imagine _why _a young man like him, who had never displayed any particular bravery or care for others before, would suddenly place himself in peril to oppose a master he had only recently sworn to serve.” The portrait paused, as if for a breath—hesitating. “I just so happen to know his reasons, and I can assure you they are reasons even Tom Riddle would not have an answer for, were he capable of understanding them.”

Cold terror flooded him. “No!” he shouted, forgetting the chains again and surging forward only to be jerked back into his seat. “Dumbledore, you promised!”

“Severus,” said Dumbledore urgently, his pleasant act falling away, “this may mean the difference between freedom and a lifetime of—”

“I do not _want_ freedom at such a cost! I do not want such a life!” He couldn’t get enough air; his vision split and darkened. The rest of this humiliating ordeal he could bear, but this—this would kill him.

“You don’t want a life in which people know you for who you really are? I have never understood—”

“I do not care if you _understand_,” he roared, “only that you keep your promise!”

Dumbledore sighed. “And so I shall.”

Dillby stormed over and lowered his mouth to Severus’s ear. “If you don’t allow this,” he muttered, “you will lose. _I _will lose. Do you know how many cases I’ve lost, Snape? _None_, that’s how many. They’re calling this the trial of the century, and _my name _will be plastered across the history books—”

Unlike Dumbledore, this man merited no pleading. “That sounds like your problem, not mine,” said Severus coldly.

Dillby’s eye twitched. Although Severus couldn’t see it, the chestnut curl was undoubtedly vibrating with fury. “Remember,” Dillby hissed, “_you _brought us to this.” He turned back to the Wizengamot. “Ladies and gentlemen! I have a late piece of evidence to submit.”

“NO!” Severus shrieked. Before it was out of Dillby’s pocket, Severus knew what it would be—a small glass phial, which Dillby held up for the Wizengamot.

“These memories were collected by Mr. Potter directly from Mr. Snape in the moments before his, er, death, which means they could not have been altered or redacted. I ask that they now be reviewed by the court.”

Snape struggled in the chains, shivering with rage and panic. They’d taken everything else—they couldn’t have _her_. He’d bite his own tongue off if he had to—he’d break his wand. “You have _no right! _Do you hear me? NO RIGHT! Those are _my memories—_not some scrap of cloth or bloody footprint to be analyzed and—and picked over by careless, gossiping—”

“Mr. Snape!” bellowed Doge. “You will compose yourself or be held in contempt of this court.”

As Severus was preparing to tell Doge where he could put his contempt, a voice from behind said, “Wait!” and Harry Potter came jogging down the steps, shoes squeaking. Under his somber dress robes, he appeared to be wearing jeans and trainers. “There’s another option,” he said, risking a glance at Severus’s face before flinching away. “You might ask Professor Snape to cast the Patronus charm. It’ll tell you everything Professor Dumbledore or those memories would.”

“Potter, are you mad?” Severus laughed hysterically. “If I won’t allow Dumbledore to speak of—of—then what makes you think I’d—”

“Mr. Potter,” Doge interrupted, “I don’t see how the Patronus of the accused can give us any useful information.”

“Look, it’ll require some explaining,” said Potter. “But—just trust me. Please.”

“Fine. But this is the last we’ll hear from the defense.” Doge turned to Severus and somehow managed to fill his expression with more disdain. “I leave it up to you, Mr. Snape. Either cast the Patronus charm or the court will be compelled to review this new evidence.” He pushed down his glasses and peered over top of them. “That we’ve given you the choice at all is a mere courtesy. And to be honest, your resistance tells me all the more that this evidence bears importantly on your case.”

Snape shook his head violently. “Evidence that is _me! _That came from _inside my brain!”_

“And which you freely placed outside of it.”

_“While I was dying!”_

Doge looked deeply put-out, like he’d do anything to be back in bed reading the newspaper instead of witnessing this scene. “Make your choice, Mr. Snape, or we will make it for you.”

Severus stared up at the fifty faces of the Wizengamot. There wasn’t a choice, really. Reveal her in one way or another—he would lose her either way. They would see, and they would laugh, and the beautiful secret that had kept him alive would be trampled underfoot. He thrashed in his chains while his mortified dignity looked on in horror, a helpless spectator—the excited murmurs of the crowd grew into a roar, and then into a rushing sound like ocean waves but faster, more rhythmic, and growing faster still—

He should never have spoken to her. He should have watched her glide on a trail of flame through the afternoon, held that memory in his heart forever, and run as far from her as he could get.

“Mr. Snape, for the last time!”

“Fine,” he said weakly, collapsing in his chair. “I’ll take—the spell.”

The chains slithered off and an Auror handed him his wand. His numb fingers barely felt the handle, and he watched his arm lift as if moved by an Imperius curse. With his mind paralyzed, it seemed his body had decided to go on without him. He tried to think—but there was no loophole, nowhere to hide. He could not do this. He _had_ to do this. He could not—he _had_ to—he could not—

The wheel in his head stopped there. The wand slipped from his hand, and when it hit the floor, he felt only relief.

That relief didn’t last long. Severus blinked and found himself being lowered back into his chair—when had he stood up? He shook his cloudy head. The chair had been moved against the wall, and where it had been, the Aurors were rolling away a false floor to reveal a ten-foot concavity. Severus realized in horror that it was a Pensieve, large enough that even people in the public galleries could see the images on its surface.

“No no no no NO!” One last time, he flung himself against the chains, but they only glowed angrily and coiled tighter. An awful noise scraped its way out of his chest—if he made enough of a racket, perhaps they wouldn’t hear the voices in the Pensieve—

“Aurors, immobilize the prisoner, if you would.”

_“Petrificus Totalis!”_

He couldn’t breathe—from the spell or the panic, it didn’t matter. She was there, in that phial, in the ocean of shimmering fog that now spilled into the Pensieve. Severus wanted to shut his eyes, like a child hiding from a monster, but his eyelids were as frozen stiff as the rest of him. Frantic, he rolled his eyeballs toward the top row of benches—at least he could avoid looking directly. But he could still hear.

_“I know what you are.”_

_“What do you mean?”_

_“You’re_ . . . _you’re a witch.”_

He’d hoped by some mercy they’d only watch his memories of the war. But this—he couldn’t even recall which memories he’d spilled for Potter in his desperation, he’d just gathered up the whole tangled mess—and now the court was going to see it all, every last treasured, shameful moment_. _His dirty little face as he adored the red-haired girl. Her brilliant eyes as the affection in them turned to wariness and then disgust.

At last, he got a breath into his lungs. His mouth and tongue couldn’t move—but if he exhaled hard enough, he might be able to . . . yes. His vocal cords produced a feeble hum. Not a very loud one, but loud enough.

_“I’m sorry!”_

_“Save your breath.”_

He gasped, and hummed louder. Louder and louder, until his chest and throat burned. After some struggle, he managed a tune—a rude old song his mother had sung—_there was an old sailor came over the seas, ha-ha, but I won’t have him—_

From the Pensieve came the roar of wind in the trees and the crack of Apparition. _“Well, Severus? What message does Lord Voldemort have for me?”_

Severus hummed around the sob that spasmed in his throat—_my mother said, won’t you bring him a stool—I brought him a stool but he sat like a fool—_

_“If you loved Lily Evans, if you truly loved her—”_

Love, love, LOVE—the word tore at him—he was dying—why, why wasn’t he dying? _Then mother said, will I put him to bed—I put him to bed but I wished he was dead—_

_“After you have killed me, Severus—”_

He wouldn’t weep. At least the spell would prevent them from seeing his face crumpled in anguish. He swallowed his tears and hummed with all his might. _Then mother said, would I hurry and wed—I said I’d not wed—so I shot him instead—_

_“But this is touching, Severus. Have you grown to care for the boy, after all?”_

The tiny panicked mammal in his brain summoned its last defense. It was as if a wire had snapped and a curtain fell over his mind, muffling the clamor of his foolish distress under heavy, dusty cloth. The world went away. He was flying backward down a corridor, the bright door at the end growing more and more distant until it hung in space like a buildingless window, shrinking until it was no larger than Venus at dawn, and there was no sound in that place except the breath of eternity hissing between the stars—

“Mr. Snape? Mr. Snape!”

The void turned back into the glowing membranes of his eyelids. He opened them. The Pensieve was gone and his chair had been returned to the center of the room, but he didn’t remember it happening. He felt like a swimmer floating in the sea of his body.

“Mr. Snape, if you would please attend to the verdict!”

“. . . Verdict?” He croaked as if he’d been screaming for days.

“Yes, Mr. Snape, the court has voted and will now deliver a verdict, if you could be bothered to take an interest.”

He shook his head, trying to clear the smoky film from his eyes. “I’m—listening.”

“On the charges of murder and conspiracy to aid Lord Voldemort, the Wizengamot finds the accused—not guilty.”

A curious pain lanced through him and passed. He wondered if Doge saying _guilty_ would have felt any different.

The room had already erupted in a frenzy of noise. Whistles, cheers, hoots, laughter, all losing distinction in a savage excitement. Not over Severus, not over the trial—excitement for its own wild sake. He had the oddest thought that at the moment the verdict was spoken, he had ceased to exist.

Doge’s expression was sour as he brought the room to order. “On the lesser charges—though that’s relative, I suppose—of Unforgivable Curse-casting and accessory to murder, kidnapping and torture, in light of the extraordinary circumstances, the court has accepted the deal proposed by the Minister for Magic: dismissal of all charges in exchange for aid in the capture of fugitive Death Eaters. As the defendant provided this aid weeks ago while awaiting his trial, this court’s business with Mr. Snape is concluded and he is hereby free to go.”

As if they had as much faith in the verdict as Doge had, the chains reluctantly let go of his wrists. People poured down from the benches and galleries. Severus looked around, baffled—their faces seemed distorted, their movements inhuman. He shut his eyes. _Get ahold of yourself, _he thought. _Get up. Get out. _He stood, and nearly fell.

“Mr. Snape?”

An Auror had caught him by the elbow. Something was thrust into his hand—his wand. He clutched it until his fist ached.

_Don’t look at them. _He staggered through the waves of thrusting bodies, trying not to imagine the grasping and tearing of hostile hands. One hand alighted on his shoulder and he recoiled, but it found its way back, steering him this way and that until he was passing through the door.

Down the corridor past the cells, up the stairs—Severus felt like a passenger in his own body. He could only vaguely feel two men pressed into either side of him, each with one of his shoulders in their grip. From under his brows, he spotted the gold glint of Shacklebolt’s earring, then Robards’s blue silk cravat. He couldn’t remember what they were doing there, but he let them steer him down the corridor.

As the golden grilles of the lift shut behind them, both men sighed and let Severus go. “Atrium,” said Robards. “Get ready, Snape—it’ll be worse up there.”

The lift juddered to a halt and opened onto a wall of noise and bodies. There were camera flashes now—his name shouted from all directions—some shouts distinctly angry while others demanding he face their way—more flashes—

_Laughter—taunts—“Hey, Snivellus!”—_

They knew they knew _they knew_.

He was dangling in the air with his pants on display. Weak, wretched, clutching his shabby, hopeless love to his chest—every man, woman and child in the Wizarding World would laugh themselves sick.

He tried to step back, but Robards and Shacklebolt urged him forward. They were going through, then—fine. _Just get out, _said his mind. _Get through, don’t look, get out, flee._ He ducked his head and shouldered more bodies out of the way.

Up ahead, among the forest of legs, a bit of bright green satin flashed. Severus’s eyes followed the fabric up its wearer’s back to a bouncing corkscrew curl.

As if it had heard a kitchen timer go off, the icy water in his veins began to boil.

Dillby spun round as Severus approached, his face registering puzzled recognition and then alarm as Severus’s hands locked around his throat.

“I’LL KILL YOU, YOU BASTARD—HOW DARE YOU—YOU HAD NO RIGHT—!”

The next few moments were lost in confusion. His limbs were seized, his fingers pried loose—Dillby’s neck slipped out of his hands—shouts of _“everyone calm down!”_ and _“get him out of here!”_—whether “him” meant Severus or Dillby, he never learned—then the crowd divided into two, like a ball of dough, one half wrapping around Severus and the other absorbing the figure in green. The dough ball dragged him through the lift door, the grilles clanked shut, and a voice said “Level Two!”

Shacklebolt leaned against the wall of the lift while Robards mopped his face with a handkerchief.

“Well, Snape,” panted Shacklebolt, “you’re off to an excellent start.”

“I never promised to be a good sport,” Severus murmured, his voice sounding very far away.

In the office of the MLE Head (which was Robards now), Shacklebolt pushed Severus into a chair while Robards, bizarrely, shook his hand. “A most hearty congratulations to you, Snape,” he said, smiling. “And of course, many thanks for your contributions to the effort.”

Severus stared at him as if he were a lunatic who’d run up to him in the street. He was still shivering with rage, and he felt weak, as though he had the flu. “I want to leave,” he said.

“Wouldn’t recommend it just yet.” Robards chuckled. “My Aurors are clearing the Atrium, but it’ll be a little while.”

Shacklebolt thrust a cup of tea under his nose, then practically dropped it in his lap when Severus made no move to accept it. Severus took a sip, for no other reason than to avoid any more conversation. The cup’s bottom clattered against the saucer as he tried to put it down.

He wanted to be alone. He never wanted another human being to look at him ever again.

Shacklebolt reached into his cloak pocket and took out the phial of memories and the feather. “Before I forget—these are yours, I believe.”

Severus snatched them and tucked them away.

Watching the phial’s journey to safety, Shacklebolt said, “I’m sorry. I know how it must have felt to be—exposed like that.”

Severus wanted to vomit. He wanted to break Shacklebolt’s nose, or worse. Clenching his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering, he said, “You have no _fucking _idea.”

“I want you to know that Gawain and I had nothing to do with that. Harry as well. We kept Lily’s name out of the trial for as long as we could.”

Rage pulsed up through his neck and throbbed in his temples. “Really? What a relief. I hereby absolve you, Minister. Happy?”

“Snape.” Shacklebolt’s voice lost its pacifying tone. “You’d have died in prison. Your health is already poor, and residents of Azkaban on both sides of the bars want you dead. You’d not have lasted out the year.”

“I still might not,” he muttered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” Snape noisily cleared his throat. “When can I leave?”

“Are you sure that’s wise?” said Shacklebolt, glancing at Robards. “With you—looking the way you do?”

Severus narrowed his eyes. “And how _precisely_ is that?”

“Like you’ve been through the wringer and haven’t slept in a year.”

“I don’t want to curse you,” said Severus calmly, “but I will if you force me to stay here a moment longer than I must.”

Shacklebolt sighed. “Do you at least have a place to stay?”

Severus froze with his teacup halfway to his mouth. “Has something become of my house?”

“We—didn’t know if you had one.”

“Well I did. Unless someone’s burnt it to the ground, it should still be there.”

Robards pulled a steno out of his pocket and flipped to a blank page. “Did any Death Eaters know its location? Are there adequate protection charms in place? I can assign you a security detail.”

“No!” Severus snapped before getting ahold of himself, aware that the more unhinged he acted, the more likely they were to force him to stay. “No—just the Malfoys knew. And any Aurors who come round will be summarily Stunned.”

Shacklebolt wore a troubling look of pity that made Severus want to beat him unconscious. “And you’re sure you can settle back in on your own?”

“I’ve been looking after myself just fine for years without you there to give a damn!” Severus snarled. He was _finished_ with this.

Shacklebolt held up his hands. “Fine, fine. I should know better.”

Overcome with sudden exhaustion, Severus rubbed his face. He needed to leave, right now, before he said or did something he regretted_._ Or _would_ regret, once the momentary satisfaction had passed.

“Er,” said Robards, “your Floo can be reconnected by tomorrow morning—now that we know you have a house, we can put in the request.”

“And Snape”—Shacklebolt made to touch Severus’s shoulder, then thought better of it—“I hate to do this to you, but I need you to stop by my office tomorrow. We have a few follow-up questions about the statement you gave last week.”

“Fine, fine.” Severus thought about ever coming back to this building and shuddered, but he needed this conversation to end.

An interoffice memo flapped into the room, and Robards snatched it out of the air. “Looks like the lads have got the Atrium cleared.”

Severus shot to his feet, barely managing to set down his teacup without knocking it over.

“Go home and rest, Snape.” Shacklebolt smiled—warily, sensing Severus’s mood. “I’m glad things came through for you. We all are.”

“I’m sure,” Severus muttered, and hurried out.

He was so consumed by the need to escape that he took several moments to work out where he was. Once he found the lift, he made it down to the deserted Atrium and Flooed up to street level.

For a long while, he could only lean trembling against the tiles of the Whitehall men’s loo. At last he stirred himself and shook the water off his boots. Disgorged by a toilet—God, what an appropriate end to an unspeakable week.

But he wasn’t quite out of the woods. He glanced morbidly in the mirror, careful not to look at his face—nothing to be done about that—but his clothes were another matter. His holding cell had come with a few amenities Azkaban had not—a razor, a washbasin, sufficient food, clean clothes—but he still looked less than reputable, not to mention like a fucking Wizard. He Transfigured the robes into trousers and a jacket, splashed some water on his face, and headed out to the street.

There were plenty of nearby Apparition spots—his preferred one was the loo in McDonald’s—but he felt too sick and shaky to Apparate, and more than that, something in him wanted to avoid going home for as long as possible. He quickly turned off Whitehall Road, unwilling to face the tourist hordes of Trafalgar Square, and headed for the Embankment, where he could get the Tube to Euston Station and then the train to Cokeworth. Halfway there, he ducked off the sidewalk, leaned over and sobbed. It felt a bit like vomiting, as if he were expelling the stress and misery from his body, and the almost narcotic stupor that followed was almost worth the swollen face and the headache. After a few seconds he finished, wiped his face on his sleeve, and resumed his journey.

Outside the Tube station, he bought a pack of cigarettes and stood on Villiers Street to smoke one. It wasn’t peace, exactly, but a numbness that felt terrifyingly temporary. He knew he ought to be feeling something, but his body was like an empty bottle, hollow and transparent. He wondered if the people passing by could even see him. The noonday sky was white and uniform, flattening everything with its shadowless glare, and the world felt as if a unique and irreplaceable magic had passed out of it. Tourists in white t-shirts and ugly sandals blundered from one souvenir stand to the next, unaware that joy and beauty were over, and had been for some time.

That was what his great task for Dumbledore had been, after all—a way to keep her in the world, if only in the form of an invisible creditor waiting for him somewhere, expecting final payment. With their debt settled, she was truly, undeniably gone. And any world without her in it was a dung heap.

He didn’t want to go home. What was there to do in that house besides pack himself up in a box and store it with the rest of his parents’ rubbish? It was worse than that, though. There were . . . _things_ waiting for him at home. Soon the shock-induced numbness of the morning would wear off, and when he stepped back into the house on Spinner’s End—assuming it was even still standing—the horrors of the last twenty years, dammed up so ruthlessly, would break their dikes and crush him under one devastating wave. He couldn’t predict what he would do once that happened. What _he _would do—that scared him most of all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape faces the first day of the rest of his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd reeeally look closely at the tags for this one.

Severus rummaged in his pockets for his house key. He knew he wouldn’t find it, but he refused to concede to a problem this stupid and this unfair without a fight.

He’d traveled two hundred kilometers by foot and train in one day, and he couldn’t open his door.

Naturally this was his own fault. Years ago in a fit of displaced anxiety his mum had put an Anti-Alohomora Charm on the lock and he’d never bothered to remove it. He cursed and kicked the doorjamb. This accomplished nothing, and the doorknob emitted a spiteful spark the next time Severus tried to touch it.

After a glance around to be sure the street was deserted, Severus drew his wand, and the lock assembly burst out of the door in a cloud of rotten splinters.

The house exhaled a vapor of memories—the stale air of a tomb in which he’d sealed that world-ending night in May. Its funeral goods lay as he’d left them: the carpet bunched where he’d pulled out the couch to reach his hidden safe; a toppled pile of books he’d ransacked for loose papers and photographs; the teacup he’d thrust into Draco’s trembling hands after planting him on the couch so he could gather his things in peace. One swinging bookcase was ajar. To hide from Draco, he’d fled to the kitchen and heaved hoarse, gurgling sobs until he gagged, wrung dry of all warmth and pity and hope, coughing tears and strings of bile down the drain of his kitchen sink.

The couch still bore an impression where Draco had sat. Severus sank into it and the cushions expelled a cloud of fresh scents—the sour reek of water damage, the cooler mineral whiff of dead cinders—scents from longer ago, from childhood and his parents. That very moment, Eileen and Tobias might have been upstairs, out of sight but poisoning his solitude with their nearness, with the chance that their irritable footsteps might move from the bedroom to the stairs.

Time rushed backward, vanished, and left him there, high and stranded in his parents’ sitting room. Perhaps he’d dreamed it all. Hogwarts, Voldemort, Dumbledore, magic itself—all a vividly imagined escape from brute Muggle existence, while the real him stayed trapped there, dull and powerless and afraid.

He put his hand in his pocket and clutched his wand. He still had magic. He wasn’t nothing.

He was also starving. In the kitchen, he searched the cupboards, not expecting much. To say he lived like a bachelor would’ve been a ludicrous understatement; he lived more like a monk (if scumbag mill-town yobs could even _be_ monks). True to his character, the cupboard contained some desiccated tea dust, a packet of yeast (what could he have possibly wanted with _yeast?_), and a tin of chicken soup. The fridge didn’t bear thinking about. That would require full daylight, a good night’s sleep, and a Bubble-Head Charm. He opened the soup, heated it with his wand, and ate it straight from the tin.

In the dome of his _Lumos_, the cabinets loomed like temple pillars over the squat white plinth of the stove. He wished he hadn’t sat where he could see it. Once, long ago, he’d decided that if he ever topped himself, he’d stick his head in the oven, just like his dear old mum. No potions for her, just a shabby Muggle death on the linoleum floor. The most squalid way to go, but wasn’t that the point? Suicide was as squalid as it got. Even the mourners at your funeral were embarrassed for you, if you had any. Severus barely passed a minute of his day without some kind of poison within easy reach, but the oven had always beckoned as potions had not.

He turned away from the spiteful thing, like a child hiding its eyes from a monster-filled closet. _Think about something else_, he begged himself.

He took out the glass phial and the phoenix feather and set them on the table.

Memories tended to—well, to spoil a little if they spent too much time outside one’s head. But Severus couldn’t bear to put these back, not with the whole Wizarding World’s fingerprints all over them. The Ministry had returned a stolen purse without the money. He could hardly even think of them as _his_. He pushed the phial away.

That left the feather. Someone (rumor had it as Potter) had placed it at his bedside during his first unconscious hours at St. Mungo's, and when the Aurors had seized it for evidence, he'd worried about it constantly, hating the thought of other hands touching it, _his _feather, this uncanny _thing _resting atop the thorny knot of everything he was. The world believed it proved something about him, but he knew it didn’t. He _wanted_ it to be Dumbledore’s final gift to him—the promised reassurance that finally he’d done right, been forgiven. But Severus was no Harry Potter. He wasn’t a pure-hearted child who’d slain a basilisk with the Sword of Gryffindor. He’d abetted the murder of innocents, tortured children, sent that pure-hearted child to his death—everything an earnest follower of the Dark Lord might have done. His resurrection (if that’s what it was) certainly hadn’t _felt_ like a reward_._

_He dozed without dreams, carried toward rest on a warm, cloudy stream—until—thunder, fire, streaking meteor trails melting his eyeballs, boiling his skin—theophanic terror. His body burning at the center of a star. Then, awake, and weak with pain in a pool of his own drying blood._

He didn’t want that memory. He didn’t want any of them—not Fawkes’s visitation, not Azkaban, not his trial, and certainly not the ones he’d shown to Potter. He uncorked the phial, drew a few silver strands from his temple, and dropped them into the phial with his wand.

Relief descended, as powerful as a Calming Draught. He melted forward onto his arms. Perhaps he could sleep now, even sleep through the night. He pushed his chair out clumsily, and leaving the phial and feather where they lay, groped his way back to his sitting room to fall face-first on his couch.

❦

He opened his eyes when someone said his name. Remus Lupin leaned over him, leering, wand in hand.

“What—” He scrambled back into the cushions and fired off a Stunning hex that blasted a few books on his South American Herbology shelf to shreds.

Lupin’s leer vanished—or hadn’t been there at all, possibly Severus had imagined it. “It’s only me!” the werewolf cried and raised both hands, dropping his wand from one and three shopping bags from the other. Something in a bag clunked heavily and rumbled across the floor.

It took a moment for Severus’s mind to accept that Lupin’s wildly out-of-context presence in his sitting room couldn’t be explained away as a dream. He blinked, and the werewolf, though blurry now, was still there.

Breathless words were tumbling out of Lupin’s mouth. “Oh thank god—I’ve been knocking and shouting for ages! Your lock was broken and—why is your lock broken? I thought you’d been murdered by Death Eaters or—or—I thought something might have happened,” he finished awkwardly.

Feeling like he’d entered the conversation halfway through, Severus rubbed his eyes, and more of Lupin came into focus—sweaty hair stuck to his forehead; staring, over-dilated eyes; tatty Oxford shirt (buttoned up wrong, for heaven’s sake)—was Lupin ill? Had he been chased? Had he accidentally Apparated into the wrong house?

Severus’s porridge-filled brain could articulate none of these questions. “What the hell are you doing here?” he said stupidly.

“Checking to see if you’re all right!” Brazen as ever, Lupin seemed to think any idiot would find it natural for Severus’s school nemesis and at-times mortal enemy to stop by for a friendly look-in.

The tone of Lupin’s voice—that implied _be reasonable, Severus _with which he always deflected Severus’s suspicions of Gryffindor motives—snapped Severus out of his confusion and returned him to familiar emotional territory. “As far as I can tell,” he snarled, “the only threat to my security is _you_.” Lupin’s hands, which had been drooping by increments, shot back up as Severus brandished his wand. “You’ve never shown the slightest concern for my safety or welfare in—let’s see—any other moment of our acquaintance!”

Lupin shrugged sheepishly. “A lot has happened.”

Severus waited for more to follow this shocking inanity, but none did—no explanation, no apology, no _acknowledgment_. His rage lit up like a piece of flash paper, one that had awaited a mere word from Remus Lupin to ignite. “Did the Order send you? Shacklebolt, the Ministry? I was acquitted, Lupin, I’ve done nothing to deserve—I have every right to be left alone—”

“It’s nothing like that!” At last, Lupin seemed to realize how his unannounced visit must look. “Please”—he made a visible effort to speak lower—“please. I’m not here to hurt you or spy on you or—or whatever else you think. I’m here because you didn’t look at all well at the trial yesterday and I thought you might be in trouble!”

Severus considered hexing him, rolling him into the street and locking him out. If only his door still had a working lock. But—Severus scratched his unshaven chin—there was a mystery here. Lupin _did_ look afraid, as afraid as he claimed to be, and desperate and sad and at the end of his rope. It wasn’t like him to be so obvious, so—readable. Against his better judgment, Severus uncurled from his defensive crouch and lowered his wand.

“Thank you.” Lupin heaved a shuddering sigh and dropped his hands. With a second sigh, he fell into Severus’s armchair, as if light-headed from his recent fright. It was odd how he seemed to belong in Severus’s sitting room more than Severus did. His patched cloak, shirt, and trousers occupied a narrow band of dull shades that Severus thought of as “book-colored,” as if he were camouflaged for libraries, and his sandy-gray hair was the approximate hue of the armchair. Lupin could have been purchased from the same charity shop as every other article of furniture in the room. And yet his presence itched and burned Severus like an inflamed sore. His presumptuous gaze helped itself to Severus’s possessions—the instant coffee tin of Floo powder on the mantel, the broken desk lamp in the corner, the floral chintz cushions his mum had paid five pence for in 1975.

“By the way,” said Lupin, eyes closed, sounding uncharacteristically annoyed, “did you know you’re in the phone directory? As plain as can be, where anyone could find you.”

Severus raised his brow. “Yes, and?”

“And?!” Lupin lurched forward, jostling the rickety table that still held Draco’s teacup. “And _Death Eaters_, Severus!”

“Ah, yes.” Severus stood and straightened his robes self-consciously, prickling under Lupin’s scrutiny and hacked off at being scolded in his own home. “Show me a Death Eater who even knows what a phone is and I’ll worry.”

Lupin sprang up and began to pace, apparently catching a second wind and not at all concerned that he’d been held at wandpoint moments before. “It worries me that you’re not taking your safety more seriously! Surely some of your old cohorts knew where you lived?”

Severus watched him, still looking for clues. Was the werewolf mad? Severus had no idea what he’d endured in the last year of the war; maybe his nerves were gone. But so far he’d exhibited no tics or twitches, no non sequiturs or other evidence of disordered thought. He was underweight, but otherwise unchanged. “The only Death Eaters who know my residence are either dead or the Malfoys,” Severus replied, impatient to satisfy Lupin so he could get on with the business of tossing him out. “Now if you don’t mind—”

“But can you be absolutely sure?”

The unfeigned urgency in Lupin’s voice disturbed him. “Yes,” Severus lied.

“And how was your lock broken?”

“It—jammed.” Lupin didn’t deserve the truth about his recent incompetencies.

“Merlin’s sake!” Lupin cried, more to the heavens than to Severus, “are we not Wizards?” He hurried to the door and cast a brisk _Reparo _on the heap of lock innards, which leapt into place and reassembled themselves like a filmstrip run backward.

Severus followed after him. He hated letting anyone besides himself cast spells in his house, and this was _Lupin_, for Merlin’s sake. “It was late and I didn’t have the patience to—dammit, I don’t have to explain myself to you—” He folded his arms. “_Now_ what are you doing?”

Lupin was on his knees gathering up a drift of carryout menus, adverts, and election leaflets that had crowded Severus’s mail slot until his violent entrance the night before had scattered them. “I think you should make this house Unplottable,” said Lupin, grunting as he fished a leaflet from under the doormat. “A Fidelius Charm might be going too far, but you should at least use some sort of Masking Spell. Are you on the Floo Network? If so, I’d—”

“Lupin,” Severus growled, starting to worry that the man was genuinely unstable, “if there is some credible threat to my life, I’d prefer you just tell me! Now if you’re quite finished with this remarkable demonstration of mental illness—”

“Quiet!” Lupin sat up and put his finger to his lips, stock-still and wide-eyed like a rabbit sensing a fox. “What is that?” he whispered. “Listen!”

Severus was so stunned that he obeyed.

Something _was_ buzzing, like a stuck wind-up toy. But it was folly to humor a madman, and Severus had to save face. “I don’t hear anything,” he sneered.

“Yes you do!” Lupin looked a little manic. “It’s a kind of—hum.” He prowled over to the armchair and bent behind it. “I think it’s coming from here—”

Severus rolled his eyes. “That,” he said, “is an Intruder Charm, _reacting to an intruder_.” He advanced on Lupin. “That’s _you_!”

“Oh!” Lupin straightened up. “Right. _Finite Incantatem._”

“It won’t respond to _you_, you moron!” Severus canceled the charm and hauled Lupin out from behind the chair by the arm. “I think I’ve had quite enough—off you go.”

“Wait!” Lupin jerked himself free so forcefully that Severus stumbled back, shocked. But the werewolf didn’t seem aware of how violent he’d just been. “It’s rather quiet for an alarm spell, isn’t it? Is that the only protection charm you’ve got on this place?” Severus watched with growing worry as Lupin cased the room, casting Revealing Spells to and fro. “Oh, this won’t do. These charms are an absolute shambles, Severus! You must have dozens and none of them work—”

“I’m sorry,” said Severus, losing both his patience and his curiosity about Lupin’s affliction in the same moment, “did I invite you in for a security consultation? Oh wait—I didn’t invite you in at all!” Lupin wasn’t acting oddly, he realized. He was acting just like he always did, brushing Severus’s objections aside like a child’s complaints, certain that his good intentions were self-evident. Severus had not survived a war to endure this. He stormed across the room toward Lupin with his wand out. Halfway there, he tripped and stumbled into a bookcase. “LUPIN!” he shrieked. “Collect your—” He looked down. “What the hell _is_ all this?” The carpet was scattered with tins, boxes, and plastic produce bags.

Lupin paused mid-_Revelio_. “I was concerned you might not have any food in your house,” he said faintly.

While Lupin knelt to collect the spilled groceries, Severus had a new insight. “You think I’m some kind of invalid,” he said, aghast. “I’m to be your charity case. And naturally I can’t refuse, since I live at the sufferance of you and your virtuous friends—”

“For heaven’s sake!” The muffled cry emerged from under the couch where Lupin was chasing a stray tin. He extracted himself, sat on his haunches and held up his prize—a tin of baked beans—as he glared up at Severus. “Do you _really_ think that? Do you truly believe in your heart of hearts that I’ve got some twisty ulterior motive for coming here?”

The _nerve_, Severus thought, reaching up to clutch his forehead and then dropping his hands—he would _not_ make a fool of himself by losing control in his own home. “And why shouldn’t I?” he hissed, fixing a startled Lupin in place with his sneer. “You’re a proven liar, aren’t you? You spent a whole year sneaking about Hogwarts, playing the harmless daydreamer while conspiring with an escaped convict the rest of us were doing our best to—”

“Enough!” For half a second, Lupin’s face twisted into a monstrous shape. The fit passed and he slumped back on his heels. “Aren’t you _tired, _Severus? Haven’t we wasted enough time? If recent events haven’t made it abundantly clear, life is short! What’s the point of this—this hatred you hold onto?”

Severus was almost too furious to speak, but he managed. “The point?_The point? _You have no right to come here, uninvited and _unwanted_, with your alleged ‘help’ that nobody asked for—and _yes_, Lupin, I _am_ tired, I am very, very tired, and seeing your face is making it—what are you—stay out of there!” Severus leapt after Lupin, who was heading for the kitchen. “Listen to me, damn you!”

Lupin was unloading the shopping on the counter, and Severus felt the old clench of automatic shame. He hated having people in his kitchen; he felt peeled there, exposed, as if the greasy stove and dirty floor and other evidence that he fed himself shared something with his unlovely body, which he similarly hid at all costs. He followed Lupin around, covertly assessing what the man had already seen. Since the night he’d fled, two coffee cups had made gruesome rings in the porcelain sink, and the cigarette butts inside had grown a fine coat of mold. Something foul exhaled from the drain. His bowels froze at the thought of his refrigerator—which, to his alarm, Lupin was now opening. Just in time, Severus slammed it shut with a twitch of his wand.

Lupin jumped back. “I’ll, er, let you put the perishables away,” he said and set the milk on the table.

“Out.” Severus flung a jinx that knocked Lupin against the counter. “OUT!”

“Severus, calm down—” Lupin held up his hands but another jinx knocked the wind out of him before he could finish. If two words in the English language could be relied upon to send Severus mad with rage, they were _calm _and _down, _in that order.

Severus’s face flushed with fury, and then with shame, which fed his rage like tinder. “It makes you feel powerful, doesn’t it?” His voice was tight and hoarse. “This _infinite generosity_ you pretend to offer. You enjoy having people in your debt! You did it to Black, you did it to that ridiculous girl who worshipped you, and now you have come to me.” His vicious smile felt more like a grimace of pain. “Surely you could smother Potter with your passive-aggressive attentions instead? Or is he not pathetic enough?”

“Merlin,” Lupin protested, “I don’t think you’re _pathetic_—”

“And didn’t I hear you have a child now? Or is it less satisfying to care for someone who actually _needs_ you?”

That ought to have been the killing blow. Lupin would look abashed, or apologetic, or maybe he’d say something like _how can anyone be so cruel? _with that phony innocent bewilderment he’d mastered. But Lupin did _not_ look abashed, or apologetic, or bewildered. He looked instead like a man who had managed to forget the horror and futility of being alive and then suddenly remembered it.

Severus knew that look. He’d seen the same one yesterday in the mirror in the Whitehall loo. The sight of it on the face of his enemy didn’t comfort him—he felt more as if he’d voiced a secret fear hoping to hear it dismissed, and instead Lupin had confirmed it, or worse.

Lupin didn’t seem aware of what he’d done. “All right, you miserable bastard,” he muttered, rubbing his back where the counter had struck it, “have it your way.” He came up close enough for Severus to see the strange light in his eye. “I’ll leave, but I want your word—your _word, _Severus—that you will fix those Protection Charms.”

“You’re demanding my word from me in my own house?” Severus bent backward ever so slightly—Lupin was two or three inches taller than he was. Lupin neither moved nor replied. “Fine—_fine,_” said Severus. “I’ll do it. Now _get out!”_

Lupin made his way to the front door. He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “I want you to know,” he said softly, “that I’m glad you survived. And that you’re free, and that people recognize what you did. Not that you’ll give a damn, but it should be said.” He turned the knob and slipped out.

Severus slammed the door behind him and dropped his forehead against it, shaking with fury. _Glad_. Everyone was so bloody glad. Was he supposed to care? To be glad they were glad? Was he supposed to be _grateful?_

His relief at Lupin’s departure lasted until he remembered his promise to visit Shacklebolt. He returned to his spot on the couch and considered his options.

One: go to the Ministry, where just a day ago he’d made a fool of himself after his most precious secrets were exposed to public mockery, and sit through an indefinite period of social discomfort with a man he barely knew.

Two: stay right there, on that couch, until his hunger, his nascent headache, and the smell of his unwashed body forced him up, then spend the day staring into space wondering whether he should bother waking up tomorrow at all.

When put that way, the choice was clear.

Upstairs, he ransacked his wardrobe for a change of clothes, then came back down to have a wash. The icy water numbed his face and chest, but it woke him up and soothed his headache, so once he’d finished rinsing the sweat and funk off his body, he thrust his head under the faucet and let the water thunder in his ears before drying off. His hair would be a disgrace until he could have a proper bath, but that was nothing new. Certainly Shacklebolt wouldn’t give a damn. He dressed, had a quick smoke at the kitchen table, and wasted a handful of Floo powder discovering his Floo had _not _in fact been reconnected before Apparating to the Ministry.

“The Ministry of Magic wishes you a pleasant day,” said the telephone box as it spat Severus into the Atrium.

“Bugger off, you bint,” he muttered and strode off toward the lifts.

It was nearly eleven o’clock, so he’d missed the morning commuters but caught the first trickles of the early lunch crowd—unfortunately enough of a crowd to prevent him from passing through unnoticed but not enough for him to disappear into.

The guard at the security desk looked up from his newspaper as Severus presented his visitor’s badge. “Step over here, if you—” The fellow did a double-take. “You!”

“Yes,” said Severus coldly. “Me.”

“Er, reason for your visit, sir?” The guard waved his ridiculous curse-detector about Severus’s person.

“I’ve an appointment with the Minister,” Severus replied, resenting the man’s suspicion. “As it says on the badge,” he added with a glare.

“All right, then.” The man held out his hand without raising his eyes. “Wand, please.”

The scale rattled irritably under the weight of Severus’s wand, and while the guard was distracted by the little report it was printing, Severus peeked at the _Daily Prophet _lying on the desk. A photograph of himself with his hands around Dillby’s throat filled the page above the fold, under a headline that read SEVERUS SNAPE ACQUITTED OF MURDER, TRIES AGAIN.

The guard thrust Severus’s wand back at him. “Er, thirteen inches, hawthorn with dragon heartstring core, in use twenty-seven years, that right?”

“Correct.”

The guard didn’t move or speak.

“. . . Is there a problem?” asked Severus.

“Course not!” The guard shook his head. “Seen many a fine wand made of hawthorn and dragon heartstring, sir.” He still made no move to let Severus past.

“Don’t worry,” said Severus with a thin smile, “if I’d truly wanted to kill the man, he’d be dead.”

“Right, sir. Uh, have a pleasant day, sir.” The guard stepped aside. Severus swept on his way, indulging a little glow of pleasure that he still had the power to intimidate.

In the lift, that glow faded. It was obvious that everyone knew exactly who he was, and nobody looked happy to see him. The well-bred wizards and witches averted their eyes; the more gormless among them openly stared. One man hid quickly behind a copy of the _Wizarding World News, _which displayed a photo of Severus and Dillby from a different angle and a headline reading EXONERATED DEATH EATER SPY GOES BERSERK. The rest of the lift’s passengers edged away, as if expecting him to repeat the performance.

The Minister’s office was on the far side of the building, and to reach it Severus had to walk through three administrative bullpens, each of which fell silent as he passed. At the end of the corridor, the Junior Assistant to the Minister (Hufflepuff, 1989-95, scraped an A on her Potions O.W.L.) sat in a lavish cubicle guarding Shacklebolt’s door. As Severus approached, she put down her _Quibbler_ special bulletin (SNAPE UNMASKS ROTFANG CONSPIRATOR DISGUISED AS LAWYER) and informed him that the Minister would see him in twenty minutes.

He sat on a bench and tried to ignore the assistant’s open stares. As a professor, he’d been widely said not to care what people thought of him, but “disregarding” was not the same as “not caring.” The truth was that he’d always loathed other people’s eyes on him, loathed his name on their lips—unless, of course, they followed it up with praise, but they rarely did. Sitting in this stronghold of Wizarding respectability and power returned him to that ungainly, offputting child who couldn’t show his face in a school corridor without being mocked—for his face, his clothes, his general unsuitability—for his existence, as Potter _père_ had once put it. He might have been waiting outside Dumbledore’s office to be reprimanded for fighting, or rather for defending himself and not being allowed to explain.

Severus had sunk far beneath the waves of gloomy recollection by the time Shacklebolt appeared, looking harried and offering an overly bright smile.

“Glad you could make it, glad you could make it!” Shacklebolt pumped his hand. “Let’s talk over lunch.”

Severus followed him into his office. “Don’t you have a Ministry to run?”

“The Minister must eat lunch. The Minister also likes his friends to be well fed.”

Severus ignored the awkward _clang _of the word “friend” falling into the conversation. “Why is everyone obsessed with my nutrition?” he muttered, taking the chair Shacklebolt pulled out for him. “First Lupin and now you.”

Shacklebolt settled behind his desk. “Er, lunch please,” he said into the air, and a plate of sandwiches appeared. “Still getting used to that,” he laughed. “No such luxuries in the Auror Office.”

Severus waited for Shacklebolt to take a sandwich before reaching for one of his own. Again, he was back in Dumbledore’s office, accepting a biscuit or a Sherbet Lemon simply to avoid the hassling he’d get if he refused. He took a reluctant bite and braced himself for the preliminary small talk.

“Well, you look—better,” said Shacklebolt. “Decent night’s sleep?”

“More or less.”

Shacklebolt draped a napkin discreetly over Severus’s picture on the _Daily Prophet. _“By the way, you’ll be pleased to hear that Euphemius Dillby understands you were distraught and has chosen not to press charges.”

The possibility of “charges” having not even occurred to him, Severus found this news more irritating than pleasing. “How generous of him. He should be grateful he’s not dead.”

Shacklebolt’s half-suppressed smile hinted that he didn’t entirely disagree. “So,” he said, “you saw Remus, did you?”

“He . . . invited himself over this morning. He didn’t stay long.”

“And how did he seem?”

_Mad, _Severus thought, or perhaps _possessed. _“Alive, for one thing,” he settled on. “Before his presence at my trial proved otherwise, I’d been—led to believe he was dead.”

“Ah, yes, interesting story there.” Shacklebolt might have been recounting a tale of running into an old acquaintance at the pub. “You see, he got hit with a Killing Curse during the battle, but wouldn’t you know, the full moon fell just a week later and by Jove if the fellow didn’t transform right there on the slab. St. Mungo’s had to lock down the morgue level. Apparently the Killing Curse can temporarily kill the man but has a harder time killing the wolf, and as long as too much time hasn’t passed, the wolf will drag the man right back to life with it.”

“I see.” Severus recalled the strange light in Lupin’s eyes. “And did this by any chance affect his mind?”

“His mind? Why do you ask?”

“He was acting peculiar. One might even say unhinged.”

“Ah. Yes, well.” Shacklebolt found his sandwich suddenly repulsive. “The death of his wife hit him hard. Hit all of us hard, but it’s nothing to what he’s going through, poor chap.” A shadow passed over his face; grief, and maybe guilt as well. “They have a baby, too. He's with Andromeda Tonks, though. She doesn’t like having Remus around.”

Severus supposed he was expected to display sympathy. Why did people always presume he had any reason to give a damn? “I suppose he’s spineless enough to roll over and accept that,” he sneered.

Shacklebolt shot him an exasperated look but let the comment pass, turning back to his sandwich. He finished it and wiped his fingers. “Have you heard from anyone else?”

“Thankfully, no.”

“Not even Harry?”

Severus frowned. “Why on earth would I hear from Potter?”

“He’s—well, now I feel a bit disloyal telling you this, but he’s been a bit starry-eyed about you since the battle.”

Severus stiffened against yet another expectation of a civil response. “Ridiculous,” he spat. “He hasn’t said a word to me—not that I’m complaining.”

“He probably enjoys not hating you anymore and knows a direct encounter would dash that to pieces.”

Severus didn’t like the hint of teasing in Shacklebolt’s smile. “The sooner the better, then,” he grumbled.

Shacklebolt shook his head in open wonder. “You truly are the most perverse man I’ve ever met. But you did try your best to go to prison yesterday, so I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“There are worse things than prison,” Severus muttered. “Just as there are worse things than death.”

Shacklebolt studied him with a frown, as if baffled by an ethical conundrum. Severus squirmed under the attention. He’d never minded Shacklebolt, really; the man was competent and, at least in the past, reliably unsentimental. But the pitying looks and the—the sandwiches of it all were starting to add up.

“Didn’t you call me here to answer more questions?” he said, eager to change the subject.

“Yes, yes—but let’s finish these sandwiches first, I’d rather not get butter on my notes. Do have another.” Shacklebolt pushed the plate toward him.

Severus glared at it. People were forever pushing things toward him, things they thought he wanted or _should _want. He itched to refuse the way he’d refused Lupin—nastily—but Shacklebolt was not currently a man he could afford to alienate. He took a sandwich.

“Anyway”—Shacklebolt had started in on his—“I hope you’ll at least try to enjoy your freedom. You’ve earned yourself a good long rest.”

Severus shrugged. Shacklebolt, like everyone, seemed to feel himself entitled to opinions about Severus's private life. That tended to happen when people learned every last detail of your personal history.

“Do you think you’ll return to Hogwarts?” he startled Severus by asking.

“God, no.” Severus thought, in fact, that he’d rather die, but he didn’t fancy the line of questioning he’d invite if he said so.

“I can think of several out-of-the-way Wizarding towns where nobody’d bother you, if you’re interested.”

The man clearly thought he was quite subtle and clever. If Severus had been in a better mood, he’d have strung him along, but nothing about this conversation amused him. He was tired of games, tired of false solicitousness. “What?” he snapped. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“I assumed you’d _want _to get away, that’s all!” Shacklebolt’s protested innocence was as subtle as his questioning. “Merlin knows you’ve never shown any interest in company.”

“I’m quite content where I am,” said Severus smoothly. “Once I Obliviate Lupin it should be private enough.”

“If you won’t be teaching any longer, have you considered alternatives?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t had time to give it much thought.”

“I understand you have some publishable research. And I’m sure you could fetch a pretty penny as a brewer.”

All at once, Severus lost his patience. His face burned with indignation. “Is this what everybody thinks?” he snarled. “That I’ll remove myself to a cottage in the countryside and brew Wart Remover all day long? That I’ll take up a life as an unpleasant but harmless village hermit? I’d prefer Azkaban!” This seemed to shock the Minister, and Severus took some cold pleasure in that. Nobody ever seemed to believe he was _serious_ until he said something outrageous. “Or is it that you need me out of sight? You said it yourself: any public good will toward me isn’t likely to survive a _direct encounter_.”

“You could easily make it otherwise!” Shacklebolt retorted, his patience gone as well.

_Good, _thought Severus. “You’re the one who’s so concerned about the public,” he needled. “Worried my continued presence will reflect badly on you?”

Shacklebolt clutched the arms of his chair and took several deep breaths. “I know this is what you do, Snape,” he said with painstaking calm, “and I refuse to indulge it. Whatever satisfaction you get out of provoking others, you’ll have to go elsewhere.” He fixed Severus with a hard look. “Just know this: you’ve been given a chance. You _could _have a good life—friends, peace and security, the respect I know you crave. Throw it away if you like. But don’t blame anyone but yourself if you’re miserable.”

“Will you please,” said Severus through his teeth, “just ask your damn questions and be done with it?”

“Fine, fine.” With a shrug of defeat, Shacklebolt fished a few pieces of parchment out of a pile and handed them over. “Take a look at that. Tell me if you recognize any names.”

The documents turned out to be excerpts from three interrogation transcripts. Severus reviewed and corroborated them where he could. It took him all of ten minutes.

“Was that all?” he said when he was finished.

“Yes, thank you, that should hold us for now.”

Severus didn’t move. “We could easily have conducted this business by owl.”

“I’m sorry,” said Shacklebolt wearily, “did you have a more pressing appointment?”

“Merely pointing out,” said Severus with a chill in his voice, “that you summoned me here to find out when I’d be retiring to the country. Next time, just say so.”

“For once in your life, can you—” Shacklebolt dropped his forehead in his hands. “I’m trying to _help_, damnit. After everything that’s happened, it would be unconscionable to just cast you loose.”

As the next thing Severus said would almost certainly get his picture back in the paper if not entirely ruin his life, he decided their meeting was over. Hands trembling, he pushed back his chair. “Thank you for lunch, Minister, and for the advice. I will bid you good day.”

“Snape—” Shacklebolt stood but didn’t follow as Severus swept out the door.

As he plummeted toward the Atrium, he returned over and over to one thing Shacklebolt had said. _You could have respect_. Of all the man’s lies, that was the most vicious. At best, Severus might be tolerated, or more likely feared, which his idiot teenage self had equated with respect. Nowadays he’d settle for usefulness, but if Shacklebolt’s hints were anything to go by, that wasn’t an option either.

More than death, Severus had always dreaded the day he’d no longer be useful. His Occlumency might falter, or a careless word might reach the Dark Lord’s ears, and if he wasn’t murdered outright he’d find himself hearing Dumbledore say _so sorry, but there’s nothing more you can do._ He’d privately decided he would go out with a bang if that happened—take a few powerful pieces off the board with one surprise Blasting Curse, perhaps—Bellatrix and her husband, Dolohov, maybe Yaxley. Unlike Black, he had no one to miss him, no reason to stick around.

The plan had comforted him. Even if he failed, his death could serve a purpose. These days, he could live or die and it wouldn’t matter either way.

He stepped out of the lift into the Atrium and stopped in his tracks, letting the late lunch crowd stream past him. He didn’t want to die, not really. Death in battle was one thing—courage came naturally when one faced death for an urgent cause—but alone in his house like Black, with plenty of time to contemplate the pain, the fear, the possible last-minute doubts? His stomach lurched and he shook as if he were cold. He couldn’t go home, not when he couldn’t trust himself, not when he shared his body with a writhing, screaming _thing _that hungered for nothingness. He couldn’t stop, or he’d stop forever.

The lift was closing, and a startled witch held it open for him as he darted inside. After a stop by the Division for Magical Education, he knocked on the door of Room 201. “I’m here to see Mr. Robards at his first convenience,” he told the assistant who answered.

“He’s with Mr. Dawlish, sir.” The young woman didn’t look at him twice; she just ushered him inside, professional and indifferent. “When they’re finished, I’ll let him know you’re here,” she smiled.

“Thank you.” He followed after her. “Oh—and would you be so kind as to lend me some parchment and a quill?”

❦

Once he’d finished with his Head Auror, Gawain Robards drew a breath, closed his eyes, and slumped deep in his chair. He’d have loved a nap, but he had a meeting with Elphias Doge later that afternoon and a whole file of Wizengamot minutes to read. As he searched his desk for the file, Miss Cabbagegreen informed him over the intercom that he had a visitor.

“Send them in!” he said, and thumbed through a stack of folders in the desk’s far corner. The file he wanted was in there somewhere—Miss Cabbagegreen had handed it to him that morning—but the damn things were all the same color and the labels were so very small.

The door opened and the chair opposite his desk pulled out. “Ah, here it is!” he announced, waving the file triumphantly and turned his attention to his visitor.

Severus Snape watched him coolly and didn’t say a word.

“Why, Snape!” Gawain tried to pass off his dismay as pleasant surprise. The man had a forbidding face, especially when you weren’t expecting it. “What can I do for you? Any new information for us?”

Snape folded his hands on his knees, and over a period of several seconds he straightened, like an owl stretching its neck. “I’m not here about the investigation,” he said at last and held out a short stack of parchment.

Not knowing what else to do, Gawain accepted it. He turned over the first page—eleven O.W.L. results, all outstanding—next, nine N.E.W.T.s, also outstanding—what _was_ this? He flipped to the last page.

“Snape”—he frowned—“are you . . . applying for a_ job_?”

Snape shifted in his seat. “So it would seem.”

Fascinated, Gawain read on. Recent publications—relevant training and certificates—general skills. Finally, two items of work experience: _Potions master, Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry_ and _Espionage_. He glanced with amazement over the description of duties under _Espionage_. “Triple agent”—“Infiltrated dangerous organization”—“Deceived world’s most powerful Legilimens”—“Died in line of duty.” _You don’t see that one every day, _he thought, but of course he’d heard the story at Snape’s trial. Under _General Skills_, four items were listed: “Occlumency,” “Dark Arts,” “Few moral scruples,” and “Little regard for personal safety.”

He noticed it didn’t say “_Defense_ against the Dark Arts.”

Gawain sat back and studied Snape. As far as he knew, Snape was a youngish chap, not yet forty, but his face was prematurely haggard and his red-rimmed eyes stared out from deep hollows with the unhinged intensity of a convict’s. He had what Gawain’s gran would have called an “evil look.” You could see it, right there in his eyes: he was used to hurting people, and to being hurt. If ever a man had been born _looking_ like a Dark wizard, it was Severus Snape.

Snape himself wasn’t to blame for that. But he’d convinced Lord Voldemort he was as Dark as they came, and nobody who met him would have trouble believing it.

Gawain set aside Snape’s touchingly bizarre _curriculum vitae_. “Well, I can’t dispute your qualifications.”

Snape nodded.

“And I daresay you have plenty of relevant on-the-job experience.”

“Indeed.”

“But for heaven’s sake, man, why d’you want to work _here_?”

This question seemed genuinely startling to Snape. “Is there some compelling reason why I shouldn’t?”

Gawain suppressed a smile imagining Snape as a trainee Auror, scowling amongst the breathless teenagers fresh from their N.E.W.T.s. What was the man thinking? It wounded him to see Snape sitting there, his fragile pride gathered about him—celebrated but notorious, alone, without a place in this time of peace. What did one do with a man like him? He was too controversial to fold smoothly into the culture of the Ministry, and too peculiar to thrive in ordinary workaday society, with a boss and an appointment diary and colleagues with children to ask after. Good lord, to think the man had worked in a _school_.

Gawain couldn’t bring himself to say any of that. Easier to dwell on Snape’s own motivations, at any rate. “You served the Order of the Phoenix for eighteen thankless years,” he explained. “You risked your life, sacrificed your reputation, renounced all the ordinary comforts that get most of us through the day. No one would deny you’ve earned a comfortable retirement. And you’re telling me you’re back for _more_?”

Snape shrugged. “It would seem I’m easily bored.”

❦

Severus emptied his mind while Robards paged through his _ad hoc_ résumé, frowning and nibbling his thumbnail. The man had obviously stopped reading and was now turning pages merely to buy time. Once he’d reached the end again, he set it aside and sat back, looking as uncomfortable as Severus felt. “I honestly don’t know what to say, Snape. The fact is, you’d probably make an excellent Auror. If you could get along with your colleagues, of course.”

“If I may,” said Severus hastily, “the investigative division might be more appropriate for me. I do work better with a certain degree of—independence.”

“We’d be lucky to have you. But—Snape, I’m sorry, old fellow, but I just can’t.”

Severus’s heart froze in his chest. The answer didn’t surprise him, in retrospect, but his own pain did. Perhaps he’d allowed himself more hope than he’d thought. “Might I ask why?”

“For one thing, we like our recruits to be a bit younger.” Robards looked away, embarrassed—for Severus, not himself, which was so much worse. “Easier to mold, you see, less set in their ways.”

If he wanted to save his dignity, Severus needed to get up and leave right now. Instead, he watched himself sit there and _not_ leave. “If this concerns the, er, scene I made yesterday,” he went on, appalled by the desperation in his voice, “I assure you it was quite out of character and won’t happen again.”

Robards puffed up his cheeks and blew them out. “I’ll be honest, that didn’t exactly _help, _but”—he looked down at his hands—“it’s more than that. Listen, Snape, everyone admires what you did, but—there’s a general perception that—well, public opinion is divided about whether—”

“Whether I can be trusted,” Severus finished. “Whether I’m not still a Dark wizard. And whether I can be forgiven for what I’ve done regardless of why I did it.”

“Well—” Robards’s face fell. “Something like that, yes.”

“I see.”

“You understand, don’t you? If it were completely up to me, you’d be in the field tomorrow—if I didn’t have to worry about what the public thought—”

Severus called on his old mental defenses to steady him; Occlumency made these situations so much easier. “No need to explain, Mr. Robards.”

“And to be frank, there’s still some bad blood up here.” Robards held up a hand. “Nobody doubts you were on our side”—he ignored Severus’s skeptical glare—“and yet personal feelings don’t turn on a dime, you know. Mr. Dawlish, for one, that’s my Head Auror, he’s still rather sore about that Confundus Charm.”

Severus stiffened with indignation. “That was Yaxley, not me.”

“I—don’t think he’ll appreciate the distinction. My point is, my people would take some time to warm up to you, if they ever did.”

“I don’t see what _warming up to me_ has to do with it.” Severus’s temper was beginning to rise up through the unnatural calm of Occlumency. “Have I not proven my skill, my value?”

“It’s not that simple.” Robards seemed desperate to explain himself, as if he needed Severus to approve his own rejection. “Not that simple when you’re rebuilding a department shaken to pieces by a war, still mourning its losses. Not when you’re forced to answer to public opinion. Hogwarts professors may not have to worry what people think, but we here in the Ministry do.”

Reasonably speaking, Severus couldn’t help but agree. Of course no society would take him back into its bosom simply because his evil deeds had been an act—people’s minds didn’t work that way. But his unreasonable self persisted in wondering why, to this day, he still invited this automatic loathing. He’d hoped as a child that it would end once he had power and skill and a chance to prove himself. But now—now he _had_. He’d successfully deceived and helped to destroy the most powerful Dark wizard in centuries. _Why_, for God’s sake, couldn’t that be _enough_?

Revolted by his own self-pity, he composed himself. “No matter,” he said. “I understand completely.”

Robards brightened. “We’ll surely need more of your help on these Death Eater cases before it’s all over. There’s still plenty of opportunities for you to—be involved.”

Severus turned away, full of disgust at himself and at Robards. What was he, a child? Had he grown so pathetic that he needed to be managed like some kind of fragile lunatic? He stood. “Thank you for seeing me. I know you’re busy. Good day.”

Nauseous waves of humiliation swamped him as he hurried to the lift. _Just get away_, he thought, like he had in the courtroom, desperate to hide from the mocking gaze of the world. Thus it was that when the lift’s golden grilles opened to reveal Potter, Weasley and Longbottom, Severus didn’t wait for the next one but, compelled by his panic, hurried inside. He rued it instantly, though not instantly enough to get back out. Trapped for the duration, he turned his back on the boys and counted his breaths as he fell toward freedom.

He did his best to ignore the maddening sounds of their breathing and shuffling behind him, but his nerves were on high alert and their very existence was scraping him raw. He wanted to tear off his own skin. Shacklebolt had said something about Potter admiring him, these days. Would the boy dare to say something? Potter had kept his distance so far, but Potter was not known for his restraint. Severus could practically feel the boy’s desire to break the silence building like pressure in a boiler. Soon, now—four, three, two—

“It’s good to see you well, sir.”

Severus clenched his teeth to keep from screaming. Three more floors to go.

“Did Kingsley give you back the—”

“Yes,” he snapped. “Now kindly never mention it again.”

Silence fell. The lift stopped, admitted a few more bodies, and continued on its way.

“I just wanted to say—”

“I’d hoped you might have the decency to say nothing,” Severus hissed. “Clearly I hoped in vain.”

“I—” Potter audibly swallowed his outrage. “Sorry, sir.”

“You might show a little gratitude,” Weasley grumbled. “After what Harry did for you—”

“Ron!” yelped Potter.

Severus spun around. “No, Weasley, continue.” His eyes narrowed. “What _did _Potter do for me?”

“He was going to say I testified on your behalf.”

“No, I don’t think that was it.” His lips curled back in a gruesome smile. “Was it, Weasley? What act of charity am I meant to get down on bended knee for?”

Weasley swallowed.

Severus took a moment to look the boys over. Their faces were thinner, less round, newly _serious_ in a distinctly adult way—but they were still boys. All three of them wore dark robes upon which were stitched identical badges bearing the emblem of the MLE.

“You’re Aurors,” he said, aghast.

“Yes, sir,” said Potter nervously.

“All three of you!” His horror mounted along with his rage. “You’ve barely finished your schooling. There’s no way you could have taken your N.E.W.T.s and undergone the training—”

“Kingsley said we’d proved ourselves,” Weasley put in. “And they need lots more Aurors since so many died in the war.”

“I don’t—I don’t _believe _this!” Severus’s shout made a few of the other passengers jump. “But of course! The rules don’t apply to the great Harry Potter, whose halo of exceptionality has now expanded to include his _idiot friends_!” Severus seized his own hair and pulled. His temper was past the point of no return; it was all going to come out. “How much longer must I endure this? Why did I survive just to continue living in a world in thrall to the mediocre Boy Who Lived—”

“Hey!” said Neville. “Look, sir, we all know what you’ve been through, but there’s no call to take it out on—”

“What I’ve _been through?”_ Severus roared in the boy’s face, so furious his vision had gone double. “You have _no idea, _Longbottom!”

“—and Harry went through just as much, you know—he died to save everybody—”

“Well _so did I!” _Spit flew from his mouth. “Did anybody throw any parties for me? Does anybody stop _me_ in the streets to thank me? Does anybody even _look _at me except to—”

“_We_ would,” said Potter. “We’d thank you, but you’d just tell us to bugger off.”

Severus opened his mouth to deny it, but for once, Potter was absolutely right.

The lift opened on the Atrium and Severus shoved his way out. Behind him, Weasley muttered, “Wanker.” Severus froze, fingers convulsing around his wand, but the crowd flowing out of the lift swept him onward and the boys were soon far behind. Of the strangers who remained nearby, none gave him a second glance.

He wanted to scream, to vomit, to explode. His mind had come free from his body, like a bubble rising in a fishbowl, and lifting his feet was like operating a broken steam shovel; his toes kept catching on the sidewalk grooves. This often happened. When afraid for his life, he became deadly and precise, but when angry or upset or humiliated, his extremities went numb, his head swam with vertigo, his reflexes slowed—just what you needed when you were flailing about for your wand or trying to think of a clever insult. However bad things got, his own deficiencies found ways to make them worse, be that his temper and the vile words he’d spew without thinking, or his stupid overreactive body that cried and blushed and grew clumsy at the most minor distress.

At home, he found a Calming Draught in his cupboard and knocked it back while he paced. His eyes stung and his nose was clogging up—_no_, he protested, _I will not weep—so help me God, I will not let _Potter_ make me _weep_—_

The calm, once it came, was no better. It stole in and hung a bare lightbulb in his soul, exposing every bare corner, every tedious inch of his empty self. How could he stand his own company? Leaning over the sink, he let his tears drip into it and counted his breaths. Lily had lived inside him, after a fashion, as long as he’d had his task, and its completion had exposed the plain, comfortless truth of her absence—no relief, no reconciliation would come, just countless more identical days until his life ran down like a clock.

She was the best of him, as Dumbledore had said. What was the point of him now? Even her death felt far away. His grief had mutated over the years, from a cold fist crushing his heart to a slow poison that only constant activity and thought held off, until one day he wept it all out into a little glass phial where it couldn’t hurt him anymore.

_Nothing_ hurt anymore. His sharpest pains had faded into an ambient hum of boredom and irritation that would only grow louder until he couldn’t stand it any longer.

With rising dread, he turned to the oven. Newer ones would apparently shut off the flow of gas if the pilot light went out, but his was from the bad old days when housewives like his mum used them to get free of their husbands for good. Gas wasn’t a bad way to go, they said. A painless slide into non-being, and whatever mess you left on the kitchen floor was someone else’s problem. His problem, in Eileen’s case. Who would be around to find him? He didn’t even know if the adjoining houses were occupied. It could be a while.

Halfway across the kitchen, the scared animal in his brain woke up. “No,” he said aloud, and doubled over the crushing pain in his chest. Every inch of him throbbed—he’d been scooped out, split open, pierced by poisonous thorns. Lightheaded with grief and fear, he rushed into the sitting room and paced in front of the fireplace, wondering if they’d ever managed to reconnect his damn Floo. But where could he go? He _needed_ to go, needed to get out of this house—needed air on his face, and human voices around him—needed to be where time still moved forward.

He flung open the front door. Nobody was outside, but a warm breeze kicked bits of trash down the street in gusts that smelled alternately of fetid water and honeysuckle. He drew the summer Cokeworth air into his lungs and fished out a cigarette.

Something about his door didn’t look right. He was certain, for one, that he hadn’t left it covered in slashes of orange spray paint. Lupin had mentioned a broken window, but the street lamps on Spinner’s End hadn’t worked in years and Severus had seen nothing amiss the night before. He stepped backward into the street to get a better look, and the wider perspective revealed the vandal’s artistic vision in its totality. Severus gaped. If there were words, he couldn’t make them out, but there was a picture, and the general intent was clear. He wondered if the second-floor window belonged to the same message. Had the local hoodlums thought the place was abandoned? Or did they remember him, a nasty, hatchet-faced man in strange clothes who was always nearby when their skateboards hit an invisible stone?

He let out a gravelly chuckle, remembering how the last one had flipped arse over kettle like a frog missing a jump.

He lifted his wand to charm away the paint, then stopped. He rather appreciated the sneering obscenity of the gesture; he certainly found it preferable to the condescension of his self-nominated friends. It was nice to have children to hate again. Perhaps he’d leave the window broken as well.

Lupin would scold him for that. Which was all the more reason to do it, really. The protection charms, though, were another matter. He didn’t give a damn about protecting himself, but the charms themselves might offer a challenge—a project, one that could occupy him until late in the day and wear him out enough to sleep.

He went inside and got to work. None of his protection charms were house-wide; he preferred a more piecemeal coverage so a single _Finite _couldn’t remove them all, and he preferred to lay them right up against the house’s outer walls instead of making a wide perimeter. Maintenance of such a system, however, took time and effort, and the house had been empty a while. He began by teasing out the tremulous threads of a few old spells along the outside walls—defunct Imperturbables tangled with an older layer of _Cave Inimica_. There’d be no salvaging them, so he canceled them both. This layer, he recalled, tended to misidentify the house’s inhabitants as invaders, like an overactive immune system, and he swiftly tore it out before it could assert its displeasure.

By mid-afternoon, his furniture had migrated to the center of the room, his books lay in precarious piles, his carpet was folded up like a picnic blanket, and Severus had stripped out every spell on the ground floor. He spent the next two hours making a similar mess of the upstairs. In both bedrooms, he found layers of Disillusionments, Imperturbables, and Notice-Me-Nots_, _some old enough to have been cast by his mother, bless her paranoid soul. The project had plainly altered course from repair to demolition, but he was in too deep, and the alternative—stopping long enough to go back to the kitchen—didn’t bear thinking about.

Once he’d canceled the last spell, he lay amidst the debris in his bedroom, coughing on decades of accumulated dust and staring at the stains on the ceiling. He’d need new spells now, he supposed, but he didn’t feel like casting them. He’d cast them later. Or maybe never. Let Lupin and the Lestranges and every teenager in town tramp through his house, who gave a damn? Lupin was right about one thing—he’d kept his house fortified but never tried very hard to conceal its location. Sooner or later, his old friends would find him. He hoped they’d hurry; he was running out of distractions, and nothing short of fighting for his life was likely to suffice.

Downstairs, he sat on his shallow front step to smoke another cigarette. As a child he’d sat here for hours, either avoiding his mum and dad or waiting to be let back in after they’d kicked him out. His legs were much longer now—his knees nearly brushed his chin—but the spot still felt like limbo, like a patch of dead time. He rested his back against his obscene new fresco and curled his lip. _I’m home, you cunts, _he thought. They could come and kill him or draw another cock on his house if they wanted—he didn’t care.

Ten minutes later, four boys on skateboards clattered around the corner and stopped on the far side of the street. He stared and they stared back, faces blank and eyes glittering, like raccoons caught getting into the bins.

Severus flicked away his fag and stood up.

“Awright, mister?” said one of them with a nervous laugh.

“Are you the little bastards who broke my window?” Severus stepped forward and they backed away as one. “I don’t care,” he reassured them, “I won’t tell the police. Or your parents, if you have any.”

He might as well have been speaking a foreign language. One of the boys said, “You’re mental.”

Severus gave him the smile that made first-year students wet themselves. “Thank you for redecorating my door, by the way. I noticed you didn’t get a chance to paint any hair on the bollocks. By all means, feel free to add any other finishing touches you forgot.”

Four jaws went slack. He’d barely taken one more step toward them before they scattered like pigeons.

As the sun set, he reached the last cigarette in the pack. He enjoyed it down to the filter, stood, and went inside—through his trashed sitting room, through the hidden bookcase door, into the kitchen. As if he were keeping an appointment, he sat down at the table, folded his arms, and waited to see what he would do.

How long would it take to die, he wondered? How long would it be until someone found his body? Should he put on fresh underwear? It would be wise to use the loo first. He’d seen enough death to know that. But did he care, truly? He decided he did. But more time passed, and his body showed no signs of acting on this decision. What was the hurry? He continued sitting perfectly still, gazing in the oven’s direction without properly seeing it, letting his mind drift. As long as he hadn’t yet gone to the loo, he could live.

As the afternoon light faded, a fog of unreality stole over his mind. Through the haze, everything around him became mildly interesting, like furniture in a dollhouse or a town seen from high overhead. Lupin’s groceries were still strewn on the counter. Tins, mostly; a loaf of bread; a package of pasta. Five apples and a bag of fresh vegetables, none of which he knew how to prepare. One appeared to be crookneck squash; he could think of three or four potions he could make with it, but how the hell did you _eat_ it? Maybe he’d find a recipe. Could he put off killing himself long enough to learn to cook squash?

He stood up to examine it. Waxy, yellow, shaped vaguely like an alembic—an odd, comical sort of vegetable—he set it down. As he did, he noticed a bit of orange plastic behind a tin, which he discovered to be a package of McVitie’s ginger nuts.

Severus took the crinkly tube of biscuits and turned it over in his hands. He had spent what surely amounted to hours begging his mother for these things as a child. He’d eaten his first one at Lily’s house, and from that day hence he’d suffered from junkie-like cravings that didn’t abate even after Hogwarts had introduced him to a cornucopia of new sweets. To this day, ginger nuts tasted of childhood to him—not the awful parts, but the happy, golden parts alone. Other forms of memory didn’t give you that choice—the good inevitably fetched in the bad—but a flavor could preserve a single feeling as if in a glass bulb. If he recalled playing with Lily on the playground, his mind ran down a path that ended with her death. The taste of a biscuit he’d eaten at her house, though, lived outside of time.

And Lupin had brought him that. Lupin had given him goddamn _ginger nuts_. How had he known? _Did _he know, or had it been a lucky guess? Maybe Lupin just happened to be fond of them too, and for once, his assumption that Severus thought and felt as he did was correct.

Severus was still staring idiotically at the biscuits when the Floo burst to life in the other room.

“Snape!” came a voice. “I say, Snape, are you there?”

He stumbled out of the kitchen and knelt to see Gawain Robards’s head floating in the green flames.

“Had to drop by the Floo Authority to get this thing—good heavens, man.” Robards craned his neck to look around the room. “What happened in here?”

“Just making a few repairs,” said Severus.

“Oh, I see. Jolly good. Snape, I owe you an apology. I—well, I may have been a bit hasty.”

Severus waited, lightheaded with hope.

“We’re having some trouble, you see. That house near Luton, the one you said the Lestranges owned? You told us it wouldn’t be easy getting in, but we underestimated you. How much do you know about the curses these Death Eaters guard their lairs with?”

“I make no guarantees,” said Severus, “but a fair sight more than your people do, I expect.” He felt weightless, dizzy and wrung out, as though an apocalyptic storm had just passed harmlessly overhead.

“Good. Er—” Robards seemed puzzled by whatever he saw on Severus’s face. “You sure I didn’t catch you in the middle of something?”

“If you did, it was for the best.” Severus shook the fog from his head. “Well? What do you need me to do?”

“How soon can you get here?”

“Hm . . .” Severus made a show of checking an invisible watch, then rolled his eyes. “What do you think? Step aside and let me through.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next chapter:** we take a break from Snape's relentless depression thoughts to look in on Harry.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry goes to work.

When you were an Auror, you stood around a lot. On stakeouts. Waiting for informants. Trying to look busy while the magical forensics experts combed the scene. Most frustrating of all, watching your mentor do things you could easily do yourself.

Barney Williamson jerked his hand back with a hiss. “See that, Potter?” He sucked on a finger. “They might be big bad Dark wizards, but don’t assume Death Eaters won’t occasionally resort to a common trick like a Biting Doorknob.”

“I won’t,” said Harry, trying not to smile.

They stood in the shadow of two hedges that guarded the doorway, topiaries of stacked, bell-shaped bulges that resembled mushroom fairy towers. They weren’t what Harry would have expected for humorless Dark wizards like the Lestranges. Nor was the garden beyond, with its beds of flowering herbs and its fanciful little hedge maze, now in sad need of a trim. From the look of it, nobody had seen to the garden in at least a month.

“Right, so.” Williamson stood. “To review: what’s the first step in standard procedure for opening suspicious doors?”

“Check the lock for triggering hexes.”

“Excellent,” said Williamson. Harry liked his mentor very much, but the man always acted surprised when Harry knew anything at all. “Incantation?”

“_Conscium Revelio_.”

“Well done. Give it a try, then?”

Eager to cast any spell he could—the MLE kept a tight leash on its new trainees—Harry waved his wand and an ethereal gold chain appeared, snaking up from the lock to vanish through the top of the door.

“Doesn’t look like you need much practice with that one. Second step in standard procedure?”

“We try to identify the curse connected to the triggering hex.”

“Right! Now you’d best let me handle this part.” He pointed his wand at the golden chain that still hung in the air and said, _“Specialis Revelio!”_

Searching Death Eater houses with Williamson, Harry had learned about a thousand different spells for detecting magic—General Revealing Spells, Special Revealing Spells, Curse Detection Spells, Curse Identifying Spells, Curse Disarming Spells—but always, they began with _Specialis Revelio. _As so often happened, the spell did nothing.

_“Malum Revelio!” _said Williamson. Again, nothing. _“Anathematem Revelio! Pestem Revelio!”_

Williamson made it through twelve spells before giving up. “Well, Potter? What’s standard procedure step three?”

“Cast the counter-curse—but we don’t know what the curse is.”

“Correct. So now we go to step two-point-five: forget standard procedure and try something else.”

Harry thought they might have skipped straight to that step, as the team of Aurors who’d been here yesterday had surely tried the standard spells already.

Williamson frowned at his shoes. “So, any ideas?”

Harry did have one. It was, however, an idea more appropriate for seat-of-the-pants Horcrux-hunting than for Auror work, which valued notions he didn’t usually think much about, like safety and accountability.

As he struggled with this dilemma, John Dawlish appeared around the corner, looking tired and put-upon and a little twitchy. He usually looked that way, except this time the ghostly howls and barks emanating from the courtyard probably had something to do with it.

Dawlish glanced about uneasily. “How’s it going, lads?”

“We’re stumped, sir,” said Williamson. “Can’t work out the curse. How are the others doing?”

“Savage has the gate open but he can’t get past the spectral hounds.” Dawlish did not seem keen to offer details. “He’ll keep trying, but I’m not counting on it.”

“Potter here was just saying he had an idea.”

Harry squirmed. “Was I?”

The two men looked at him.

“Well,” he said, “why don’t we just trigger the curse?”

Both men raised their eyebrows.

“If we do it from a distance,” Harry explained, “we should be safe. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll be a Blasting Curse that makes us a nice new door.”

Dawlish scowled, then nodded. “Let’s try it.”

They moved back into the hedge maze, where Williamson took out a knut and charmed it with a pair of tiny wings. As it came to roost in the lock, there was a flash of blue light and a cloud of smoke. Then a breeze cleared the smoke to reveal a seamless brick wall where the door had been.

“Bugger,” said Williamson.

Harry winced. “Sorry.”

❦

“Oi,” said Augustus Proudfoot as Harry, Williamson and Dawlish approached. Beside him, Ron was casting spell after spell on the main entrance, which was very grand in its three-story porch. “Don’t you lads have a door of your own?”

“We bollocksed ours up,” said Williamson sadly. Above them, a breeze stirred two old oak trees and cooled Harry’s neck.

“Don’t touch ours, then. We were just starting to get somewhere.”

Ron didn’t seem to share Proudfoot’s confidence. Proudfoot let Ron do far more than Harry’s mentor did, but Ron didn’t crave independence the way Harry did, and every time Harry ran into him, he looked a little lost.

Ron lowered his wand and stepped back, wiping his sleeve across his forehead and glaring up at the house’s weathered brick facade. It seemed to stare back, untroubled by Ron’s hostility.

“There’s a trigger hex on the lock,” Ron told them. “But—”

“You can’t work out the curse.” Williamson nodded. “We couldn’t either.”

“Keep on with those spells, Weasley,” said Dawlish. “If none of them work, we’ll have to get creative.”

“Whatever you do, don’t trigger the curse just to see what happens,” said a voice behind them. “That would be unwise.”

_Oh no, _thought Harry.

Sweeping up the drive with his black robes taut in the breeze, parting the lavender hedges like a specter of death gatecrashing a garden party, came Snape.

It was so familiar, the sight of Snape bearing down on him to ruin his day, that Harry momentarily forgot where and when he was. There’d been no battles and he wasn’t an Auror, he was just a student about to be in very big trouble.

Then he remembered he’d grown up, left school, defeated Voldemort, and generally earned the right to never see Snape again. Sharing a lift with him at the Ministry had been bad enough, and now, less than twenty-four hours later? Harry needed more time to recover. Say, ten years.

Dawlish watched Snape’s approach with narrowed eyes. “Severus Snape,” he said coldly.

“John Dawlish.” Snape’s face was blank. “Now, if we’re finished correctly identifying one another, I was told you were having trouble opening a door.”

“Sir, what’s he doing here?” muttered Proudfoot to Dawlish.

“Mr. Robards,” said Snape before Dawlish could reply, “thought my knowledge of Death Eater curses might be of some use to you. Since you aren’t yet inside, I can only assume he was right.”

Harry and Ron exchanged a silent cry of despair. What were the chances that the MLE would recruit _Snape_ of all people—and that of all the Auror teams he could’ve wound up on, he’d be sent to theirs? For that matter, why would he _want_ to help them? He hated everyone—surely he ought to have been halfway to the Maldives by now.

If yesterday Snape had looked a bit seedy, today he looked defiantly awful—unshaven, carelessly dressed, hair so dirty it stood up in clumps. The sunken skin under his eyes was as lividly red as if the capillaries underneath had burst. Surrounded by Aurors in their smart robes, he looked like he’d come to be arrested, not to help.

“We weren’t consulted about this,” said Williamson stiffly.

“I suppose,” said Snape in that slow, bored tone Harry knew so well, “your approval wasn’t deemed necessary.”

“Well, you’d better leave until we’ve had a word with Robards,” said Proudfoot.

“No, no, lads.” Dawlish ignored Snape. “Robards must’ve thought we’d need a wizard with the Mark to get inside. Lucky we’ve got a tame one walking free, eh?”

Snape’s thick black brows arched and bristled—like angry cats, Harry thought. “If you knew anything about the Lestranges, you’d know that some members of their family are not Marked and thus they would never protect their house with such a spell!”

“Really?” said Dawlish. “Then you might as well be on your way.”

As gruff as Dawlish could be, Harry had never heard him speak like this to anyone. And Snape, at least by his usual standards, had done little to earn it. So far, anyway. Harry leaned over to Ron. “Do they have history, d’you think?”

“Dad says Dawlish has got a grudge. Very humiliating for him, you know, Dumbledore’s killer getting to be a war hero while he’s just a dupe who got stitched up by Death Eaters.”

Harry knew the story of Dawlish’s time under a Confundus Charm, having been warned several times never to bring it up. “He must know nobody blames him for that.”

Ron shrugged. “That just makes it worse, doesn’t it?”

Snape’s temples were now laced with ugly veins that, as a child, Harry had sworn he could see tick, like second hands counting down to his doom. As horrible as Snape could be to students, he had a knack for staying just inside the bounds of courtesy with his superiors; clearly, it was about to be severely tested.

“I will _not _be on my way,” he said through his teeth. “I am here at the behest of Mr. Robards, who might have a word to say about your obstruction.”

“And how do we know he sent you?” Dawlish folded his arms. “Did he write you a note?”

“He probably assumed you would not require proof!”

“Well, I’m afraid I do.” Dawlish’s smirk reminded Harry not a little of Snape’s own. “Standard procedure, you know.”

Snape’s mouth trembled. “If I didn’t know better, I might think you suspected me of ill intent.”

“And why shouldn’t I?” Dawlish didn’t let Snape answer. “Sure, you turned state’s evidence when you thought it might keep you out of Azkaban, but that’s not enough for me. One can’t be too cautious these days, you understand.”

“Yes.” Snape’s voice grew soft and composed, which Harry happened to know meant _more _danger, not less. “Given your history, I can see why you might be cautious.”

Dawlish tensed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I too would be on my guard if my will could be usurped by the flick of any passing wizard’s wand.”

Like Mad-Eye Moody, Dawlish had one of those faces that had seen so much wear and tear it could no longer move very much. Now it twisted in unmistakable rage.

Harry got it, he really did. It was easy to hate Snape when he was standing in front of you, being a right cunty bastard. But Harry _knew_ things now, about what kind of person Snape was. He’d spent weeks convincing the Wizarding World whose side Snape was on, and he couldn’t just stop now.

“Um, sir,” he said to Dawlish, “I know he’s not making the best impression”—he ventured a glare at Snape—“but I can promise the professor wants to see the Lestranges in Azkaban just as much as we do.”

Snape acknowledged Harry just enough to sneer at him. “If you don’t mind, Potter, I need your clumsy intercession like I need a hole in the head!”

Well, he’d done his best. _Fine_, he thought, _you’re on your own._

“Would _somebody_ have a go at this damn door before we die of old age?” moaned Proudfoot.

Dawlish folded his arms. “Well? Show us what you’ve got, _Professor_.”

Snape’s eyes darted from one Auror to the next, face rigid with that same shockingly uncivilized fury he’d directed at his teenage bullies—as if for him, this wasn’t just an unpleasant altercation but a fight for survival. He bared his stained teeth—actually curled his lips back, like a dog—and then, to Harry’s relief, turned his attention to the door.

When Snape performed magic, Harry could almost see the person his mother had loved—curious, inventive, clever, completely absorbed. He cast several elegant wordless detection spells, each one racing up the doorjambs to ignite into a fiery glyph that he would study for a second or two, muttering, before casting another.

“D’you think he’s got any idea what he’s doing?” whispered Ron.

Harry shrugged. “Doesn’t he usually? Those don’t look like spells _we’ve _ever learned.”

Snape made a satisfied sound, stepped back, and slashed his wand through the air. Without hesitating, he opened the door.

Harry’s lungs filled to shout. He had heard what happened to Aurors who didn’t make sure a curse had been properly removed—but Snape had already vanished into the dark. He reappeared a moment later, arms folded, looking unimpressed.

“Do you require an invitation?” he sneered.

Harry gaped. Swan dives into near-certain death had always been _his _province, and he’d managed to outgrow—_oh no_, he realized. _This is what it was like to be Snape._

Dawlish raised a hand. “Careful, lads. The Mark might be protecting him.”

Snape flung his arms down at his sides. “It is _not _the blasted Mark!”

Harry reminded himself he’d get no thanks for this and that doing the right thing was its own reward. Before he could talk himself out of it, he darted through the doorway, forcing Snape to step aside.

“All clear!” he called out.

Dawlish, Williamson and Proudfoot didn’t budge. Ron shifted from foot to foot, as if his instincts opposed walking toward Snape so violently that he had lost the ability to move.

Dawlish solved Ron’s problem. “Weasley, go fetch Savage. The rest of you, in. Carefully! Keep your guard up. But we’ve no time to lose.”

They crowded into the dark, low-ceilinged entry hall, which smelled of wood polish and water-damaged plaster. Dawlish gave his standard speech about every surface in a Dark wizard’s home being cursed until proven otherwise. In the background, Snape strolled about, peering through doorways and lifting rug corners with the toe of his boot.

Williamson called Snape over. “A big chance you took there, with that door.”

Snape fended off an aggressive coat hook. “There’s no risk if one is confident in one’s spellwork,” he said haughtily. “Which any Auror should be.”

“Maybe he knew he’d be safe because he’s been here before,” said Williamson.

“I have never set foot in this house in my life,” hissed Snape.

“All right, you lot.” Dawlish waved them over. “Proudfoot, you cover the ground floor of the west wing, Williamson and Potter can take the east wing. I’ll send Weasley and Savage up to the top floors once they’re back. Let’s get this done in under two hours if we can. Snape—” Dawlish turned to him. “You can go. Tell Robards you did what he asked.”

Snape’s eyes lit with rage. “I have cast no Dark spells, I have done nothing to merit—”

“You’re a Dark wizard and this is a Dark wizard’s house. That’s enough reason for me not to let you loose in it.”

“That’s precisely the reason I’m here!” Realizing how his words might be taken, Snape added, “Knowledge of the Dark Arts does not make one a Dark wizard.”

“Oh I think it does.”

Snape went very still. “Do you know,” he said softly, “why Alastor Moody was such a successful Auror? It was because he had practiced Dark magic himself. His use of it left him with a certain sensitivity to its presence that was of great advantage to him when defending against it.”

“Ah,” said Dawlish, the lines on his face deepening with anger, “an admirer of Moody, were you? Did you kill him yourself or did you just watch?”

“I’m afraid I had to settle for a second-hand account,” said Snape. “While we’re on the subject of the war, maybe you can tell me how many Muggle-Borns you threw in Azkaban.”

Dawlish stiffened. “I was—”

“Confunded, yes.” Snape smirked. “I’m starting to wonder if you’re ever not.”

As Dawlish went for his wand, Harry seized Snape by the elbow and dragged him through the nearest door. Snape went, too startled to resist, and by the time he’d recovered, Harry had shut the door and cast the strongest Locking Spell he could.

Snape shook his arm free. “Unhand me, Potter, you presumptuous maniac!”

They were in some sort of pantry. Huge sacks of flour lined a wall of rough shelves, and the air swam with flour dust. Harry tried not to cough. “Oh, _I’m_ the maniac?” Now that they were no longer touching, he edged away from Snape. “I’m trying to help you—what were_ you_ doing?”

“Offering my assistance to ungrateful cretins, that’s what. Which appears to be my sole lot in life!” Snape made a ludicrous show of straightening his clothes, which he seemed to have slept in. “And what infinite well of conceit feeds your presumption that_ I_ would need your help?”

Harry thought about the last month: his pleas with Kingsley and Robards to give Snape a chance; his many interviews with the odious _Daily Prophet _in Snape’s defense_; _his hunt for a lawyer good enough to keep Snape out of prison. But he’d promised himself never to mention any of that to Snape.

He took a deep breath. “Just—don’t let Dawlish wind you up like that, okay, sir?”

“Oh _now _it’s ‘sir’ this and ‘professor’ that! Changed your mind about me, have you?”

Harry was so shocked he could barely get the words out. “Well—yes!” _You blind, bitter lunatic, _he nearly added. “Did you miss the part where—”

“And by the way, I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of my business with your superiors.”

“Look,” said Harry, his frustration boiling over, “are you here to help or not? Did Robards really send you?”

“What kind of—” Snape crowded up close, and Harry noticed with a start that Snape had to look slightly _up _to meet his eyes. “You little maggot! Is it so hard to believe that I, who have been working against Death Eaters for as long as you’ve been alive, might have more to contribute to this situation than yourself? And that a person of influence might value my considerable knowledge and experience over the mediocre skills of the Boy Who Lived?”

It was as if Snape were a clockwork automaton that could do and say only one thing, grinding out the same old notes like a piano roll of malice, as if his very life depended on the illusion that nothing between him and Harry had changed. Harry was sick of it.

“Why,” he tried and failed not to shout, “are you _still_ trying to prove you’re better and smarter than me?”

Snape smiled nastily. “I don’t need to prove it!”

Harry shut his eyes. He reminded himself that another Snape was in there, a Snape who’d loved and been loved by Harry’s mother, a Snape _this _Snape was determined for unguessable reasons to hide. Harry had spent the last month fighting for _that _Snape; surely he could put up with this one for a couple more hours.

“Look, can we just get on with this? I’ll get Dawlish to let you stay and then we can steer clear of each other.”

Snape shook his head and stalked off, muttering, before canceling the Locking Spell and flinging open the door.

Dawlish and Williamson crouched nearby as if they’d been listening, or perhaps planning to break down the door.

As it opened, Dawlish leapt back, apparently unwilling to deal with Snape from closer than five feet. “It’s your lucky day, Snape,” he said grudgingly. “You’re staying after all. The staircase goes up two stories, but the house has three. Find the way onto that top floor.”

Snape nodded, his face frozen.

“Potter, go with him. You can search for evidence while you keep an eye on him.”

Harry didn’t look, but he and Snape almost certainly wore identical expressions of outrage.

If Dawlish noticed, he was unmoved. “Snape, you’ll stay in Potter’s sight. You won’t do anything without his say-so, and you’ll assist him with whatever he needs.” He shot Snape a mocking look. “Liability, you know—can’t let civilians roam free in a crime scene.”

As if to say exactly what he thought of this rule, Snape turned and stormed off into the west wing. With an apologetic glance at his bosses, Harry hurried after him. He found Snape just off the kitchen, halfway up a wooden spiral staircase.

This would be fine, Harry thought. All he had to do was stay calm. Snape was powerless if you didn’t take his bait.

“Avoid every third step,” Snape called down, “unless you’d like to send us both back to the bottom.”

Harry hesitated. “Er, third step counting from the ground or from the first step?”

“One usually begins with the first thing when counting things, Potter.”

Harry breathed in through his nose. _Don’t take the bait, don’t take the bait._ “Just trying not to get us both—killed—” He struggled to clear the third step, his hand flying out to the newel post; the space was very narrow. The steps were steep as well, and they emitted alarming groans when he put his weight on them.

“Since I’m to be saddled with you for this task,” said Snape with a grunt of effort, “perhaps you might inform me what we’re looking for.”

Harry did not point out that only _he _was looking for anything besides a hidden door, as he didn’t fancy getting his face hexed off. “Whatever, really. Any evidence that might point to where the Lestranges are hiding.”

“Were you hoping for a note? ‘Staying at the King’s Arms in Dunstable,’ that sort of thing?”

Harry glared at the back of Snape’s head and pictured it bursting into flames. “Anything,” he repeated.

He collided with Snape’s back as Snape stopped to cast a _Revelio _on the ceiling. Harry wondered if he had any idea what he was doing or if he was simply going to cast Revealing Spells on every surface in the place. Finding nothing, Snape swept into the corridor with his wand out, slamming doors open as he went, some of which crackled with magic.

“Hey!” Harry caught up to him. “Those could have had more triggering hexes on them!”

“I had no intention of standing around while you took all day trying every detection spell in the book.”

“You’re going to piss off Dawlish if you don’t let me take the lead, you know.”

Snape stopped in his tracks and turned around. “My, my, haven’t we turned into the little brown-noser? Where was all this respect for authority before, Potter? Or do you enjoy being an authority a bit too much yourself?”

Harry ignored the absurdity of _Snape_ accusing anyone of getting off on authority and followed Snape into the most stressful bedroom he’d ever seen. Iron candlesticks as high as his shoulders stood about, caked with globs of wax, and a malodorous bear rug growled as Harry tiptoed past. Snape clamped its yellow teeth shut with a spell and gave Harry a long-suffering look, then cast a globe of violet light that made the wall ripple like the surface of a pond. A silk tapestry flew up and subsided, singed at the edges.

Harry began his search with the bed, a morbid cubicle of black-stained wood fit for a hibernating vampire. “Ugh, d’you suppose Bellatrix and Rodolphus slept there?”

Snape shrugged. “They rarely spent time in each other’s company. Besides, this wasn’t their primary residence.”

“Have you been to that one, then?”

Snape cast another wordless spell. “Mind your own business.”

“I was just wondering if you’d seen anything useful there. Jeez.” Having satisfied himself that nothing of note lay behind the bed curtains, Harry turned to the fireplace; people tended to burn important things when they left in a hurry. The iron fire-dogs squatting on the hearth still held a half-burned log, and they barked at Harry as he combed through the ashes.

“For Merlin’s sake, Potter,” Snape tutted. “If it’s got any feature that could function as a mouth, assume it bites.”

“Thanks, I know.” Harry scowled, then gave the fire-dog a last poke. He’d been a wizard for ages, but animated furniture never lost its charm for him. He stood up and backed into a fire screen shaped like a fan, with a lovely pierced brass pattern that, viewed up close, could be seen to represent screaming, agonized faces. With a lit fire flickering behind it, the holes in the brass would no doubt suggest the tortures of the damned. Harry shuddered and left it alone.

Snape indeed seemed determined to check every vertical, flat, crosswise and slantwise surface in the room. He worked quickly, with a clear method, and Harry didn’t recognize most of the spells he cast; remembering how stymied Snape had been with the Marauders’ Map, Harry wondered if he was simply more comfortable sniffing out Dark spells.

Harry edged around him to reach a wardrobe in the corner. Like the bed, its design was gloomy to a farcical degree; its decorative latticework made it look like a demonic confessional. Harry cleared it of several deadly curses and opened the door.

A tall robed figure emerged. The air burned with cold, and horror emanated from the figure’s gaping hood, the hypnotic pull of its blackness making Harry’s head swim with vertigo. Fred was falling under a shower of stone while Molly Weasley sobbed. Cedric’s eyes were blank and Sirius’s face was startled as he fell through the Veil. Dumbledore’s body plummeted from the Astronomy Tower. Snape’s eyes pleaded with Harry, blood gurgling in his throat and staining his teeth—his clawed hand clutched Harry’s robes—_look_—_at_—_me—_

There was a shout and a bang, and Harry lay on the floor. Snape’s face hovered over his, fierce and wan but no longer bloody. The wardrobe, now shut, rattled indignantly.

Harry sat up. “I was handling it!”

“You were very clearly _not _handling it.”

Harry flushed with shame. “Well, you didn’t give me a chance, did you?” He was still shivering, still aching with grief, overcome by a weariness with life that came and went these days. Snape was the last thing he needed right now.

Snape helped him to his feet the way one of his students might take a pickled newt from a jar. “Really, Potter? After all you’ve seen, your boggart is still a Dementor?”

Harry’s angry retort died in his throat, stifled by a wave of despair. _Had_ his fears truly not changed since he was thirteen? He had learned nothing—had it all _been _for nothing?

A less gloomy voice in Harry pointed out that the visions had changed, at least somewhat: he no longer heard his mother pleading for his life anymore. Besides, a Dementor was a respectable boggart by any standards.

“Why _shouldn’t _I be afraid of something that sucks out all your hope and joy?”

“It’s unimaginative, not to mention pathetic.” Snape made a face. “Oh, you’re afraid of _feeling _bad? How tragic. I don’t know what I’d do if I _felt _bad.”

Harry didn’t think he’d wanted to murder Snape this much even after he’d killed Dumbledore. Through some hidden reserve of willpower, he didn’t say so. “Not all of us can be addicted to misery,” he muttered and stormed past Snape out the door, too angry and shaken to look at him.

On the threshold of the next room, an invisible hand pressed into his chest and shoved him backward.

“Potter!” Snape appeared beside him. “There’s a Poisonous Stinging Hex on that door, you little fool!”

“How do _you_ know?” Harry flushed again, knowing how immature he sounded and thoroughly fed up with himself. He’d been through a war. How could a little boggart still upset him this much?

“Rodolphus guards his private studies with that hex in all his residences!” Snape disabled the spell impatiently. “You see? _This_ is why you can’t be trusted on your own—your rampant emotions cause stupid mistakes!”

Harry turned away, certain that if he continued to look at Snape’s face, they’d _both_ wind up in tomorrow’s paper.

The study was smaller than the bedroom, less gothic and more practical. He checked through the bookcases, searched under a chesterfield, avoided looking too closely at the moth-eaten deer heads mounted on the walls, and then addressed himself to a rolltop desk. He cleared the desk of curses and began the battery of unlocking spells Williamson had taught him. Behind him, Snape was scouring the walls with magic_, _but Harry could feel him watching.

He’d fumbled several spells before the combination of his bad mood and Snape’s judgmental presence broke the last of his concentration. Thrusting his hands into his hair, he staggered back and gave the desk a vicious kick.

“Attacking the furniture.” Snape smiled unpleasantly. “What shocking behavior from the high and mighty Auror.”

Harry clenched his jaw and sucked a breath through his nose, as furious with himself as he was with Snape. “What’s the point of your special expertise if you’re just going to cast Revealing Charms?” he muttered. “Any of us could do that.”

Snape pretended not to hear him.

“Oh, real mature.” Harry tried to force the desk physically, then thrust his wand under the rolltop and pried until the wand nearly broke.

He _hated_ to ask—but there was no other choice.

“Could you—help me here, please?”

Snape turned to Harry with an icy glare. “Oh, it’s help you want now? I thought _you_ were the Auror here.”

Harry glared back. “And Robards sent you here to _help_ us search the place. So you can try to get this open, or you can tell Robards—”

Snape’s whole body went stiff and straight. “I’d wondered how long it would take you to pull rank, you strutting little popinjay!” He stalked toward Harry. “You are an Auror in name only, recruited for your fame and not your skills, untrained and underschooled, a puppet of cynical superiors who prefer the appearance of talent to the real—”

Harry drew himself to his full height, fists clenched, his face hot and tingling. “I swear to God, Snape, if you don’t _back off_—”

Snape stopped approaching. Whatever he saw on Harry’s face, he seemed to have reassessed Harry from “rival, treat with disdain” to “madman, manage carefully.”

Harry often forgot that he no longer looked like someone to be trifled with. He was taller and broader than Snape now; for that matter, he’d defeated an immortal Dark wizard. He wasn’t sure if he could beat Snape in a duel yet, but he could certainly hurt the man if he wanted to.

But what was he thinking—he didn’t _want _to duel Snape. It was a stupid wish, but he wanted them to sit down and compare what had happened to them, and talk about Harry’s mum, and finally learn to understand each other.

Why did Snape prefer _this _to that? Why couldn’t he just _stop?_

Snape was waiting for him to step aside from the desk. Once he had, Snape cast an overpowered detection spell that lit up the whole room and then broke the locking charm with a few flicks of his wand. The rolltop of the desk snapped up like a window shade.

It was empty. Harry searched all the drawers and found nothing so much as a paperclip.

“All of that trouble—” He rubbed his face in defeat. “They probably wrapped the thing in spells so we’d waste our time trying to break in.”

“Oh, I’m sure they left you a convenient travel itinerary somewhere,” said Snape, sounding ever so slightly less unkind than before. “Come along, we’re not even half done with this floor.”

“Wait! The wardrobe.” In his haste to get out of the bedroom and away from Snape, Harry had forgotten to search it.

“Empty,” said Snape, and swept on his way.

They entered a large, dark room with no windows and only enough light to discern that it was completely bare of furniture. Then Snape flicked his wand at a low-hanging chandelier and Harry gasped. He forgot all about his burning desire to strangle Snape as the shifting light revealed a magnificent mural covering all four walls from floor to ceiling.

Harry drifted around the echoing room with his mouth open. The mural showed a hunting scene, and as it was a Wizarding painting, the huntsmen and their quarry galloped from one wall to the next in an endless loop. The object of the hunt was a unicorn, and close on its heels, the hunters passed one at a time.

Dawlish would have ordered Harry to stop milling about admiring the decor, but Harry could sense it—this room was important. Material evidence might determine where the Lestranges were, but their art might explain how they thought.

Each of the hunters had an inscribed golden ribbon following over their heads. He squinted at the inscriptions, which were written in Medieval-looking letters and very hard to read, and made out the one following the leading hunter: _Corvus Lestrange. _After him came _Aclulf Lestrange_—_Baudran Lestrange_—_Enguarrand Lestrange_—and the women—_Urraca_—_Wulftrude_—_Nadalberga_—_Brunissende. _The men wore velvet tunics and leather hose, the women wore satin dresses, and all of them wore feathered hats or turban-like scarves with funny little flaps or hoods.

In the branches of a low-hanging tree hung the Lestrange family crest: a crow or a raven sitting atop a funny-shaped weathervane, and a Latin motto. On Williamson’s recommendation, Harry now carried a little notebook around, and he took it out to write down the motto, sounding out the words as he went:

“_Corvus_ . . . _oculum_ . . .”

_“Corvus oculum corvi non eruit,”_ said Snape from across the room. “It means ‘we’ll crush anyone but each other.’”

Harry hid his surprise that Snape had just volunteered helpful information like a reasonable person. “Why’s it got Corvus’s name in it?”

“Corvus is a family name going back over nine hundred years.” Snape’s wand sent little waves of light skittering across the ceiling. “This painting must represent the family’s earliest patriarchs and matriarchs,” he explained, slipping into his self-important lecturing persona.

For once, Harry didn’t mind it. He would happily exploit Snape’s urge to show off if it meant learning something useful. Robards had sent the man for his expertise, after all.

The hunt was coming to an end. The hounds had drawn close enough to snap at the unicorn’s feet, and finally an arrow from Corvus’s bow brought the creature to the ground. Harry stared in horror at its pure white pelt darkening with blood as the hounds tore out its throat. Then, at the call of Brunissende’s horn, the hounds scattered, the spurting blood reversed its flow, the unicorn leapt to its feet, and the hunt began again.

Harry watched the unicorn run and fall, run and fall. “Why would any wizards want to show their ancestors killing a unicorn?” he wondered.

“It’s symbolic.” Snape sounded as though he loathed the very idea of symbolism. “It probably represents the immortality of the Lestrange bloodline.”

Harry wondered how long Snape’s love for the sound of his own voice would distract him from hating Harry. “Because unicorn blood makes you immortal? I thought you were cursed if you drank it.”

“I expect the scene also represents their immunity to trifling mortal dangers like curses.”

“But—they _aren’t_ immune to curses, are they?”

“No more than they are immortal. Unless one of those nitwits secretly managed to reproduce, which I . . . doubt . . .”

Snape had stopped casting his spells to gaze at the painted wall. He leaned close enough for his majestic nose to brush the paint, wearing a peculiar expression Harry had never seen on him before—slack, wide-eyed, mesmerized.

In the portion Snape was looking at, the hunt passed through a tunnel which unicorn, hounds and hunters disappeared into for a long breath before bursting out the opposite end. Harry came over to study it. If he held still, he could hear the echoes of hoofbeats inside.

But besides the tunnel, which was largely featureless, there wasn’t much to see. Harry stared for a while, but couldn’t figure out what Snape found so fascinating. Over and over, the tunnel devoured the unicorn and belched it back into existence. It meant something, clearly. To Snape, at least. Was it too symbolic?

“What is it?” he asked, after an uncomfortable amount of time had passed without either of them speaking.

Snape stepped back and blinked free of his trance. “It’s a painted unicorn running through the woods, Potter, what do you think?” He turned on his heel and strode quickly toward the door.

The painted room led into the east wing, which was really just one long, narrow room: a gallery, hung with family portraits and scattered with leather chairs and ottomans, mostly clustered around the fireplace. Occasionally, a hunting trophy hung in place of a portrait, and a row of glass cabinets stood against the walls.

Harry peered into one. It resembled a shelf in Borgin and Burkes, packed with sinister curiosities—tiny deformed skeletons, imaginary creatures stitched together from parts of dead animals, stuffed birds with human teeth, fetuses in jars that looked mostly human but not quite. Harry wrinkled his nose. What _was_ it with Dark wizards and these sorts of things? He turned to a mounted hunting trophy and found it wasn’t one in any ordinary sense. A fox’s head had been sewn onto the body of a duck, and the duck’s back half had been removed so it appeared to be emerging from the wall in mid-flight. The fox’s mouth was open in a frozen scream, but its eyes followed Harry pleadingly.

He turned away. “Ducks on the wall, I get,” he said, more calmly than he felt. “But fox-duck things need an explanation.”

“Grebe,” said Snape.

“What?” Harry looked over to see Snape shoot a little blue lightning bolt down the wainscoting. It tickled the portraits, who giggled, then glared at Snape reproachfully.

“The bird is a grebe, not a duck.”

Harry rolled his eyes. He looked into another cabinet at the head of a kneazle wearing tiny ram’s horns. Given the decor in his office, Snape probably found this room homey. “Do all Death Eaters keep stuff like this in their houses?”

“I believe these objects were Rodolphus’s particular obsession.”

“But what _is _all this?”

Snape stilled. Again, something had diverted his interest enough to make him forget he was talking to Harry. “It’s creation.”

The excitement in his voice made Harry uneasy. “Creation of what, exactly?”

Snape’s smile made Harry’s skin crawl. “Life.”

“But—” Harry blinked. “This isn’t life, it’s death.”

Snape shrugged, as if this were a trivial distinction. He knelt in front of a cabinet and studied something inside. He crouched there so long that Harry came over to see what had him so intrigued.

The object inside was shaped like a deer’s or a horse’s skull, but over the skull, the skin of another creature had been stretched. It looked like—

“Um—” His gorge rose. “Is that—?”

Snape tilted his head, studying the distinctly shaped cartilaginous nose, the horribly stretched lips and eye holes. “A Muggle, presumably.”

Harry shrank back, light-headed. A fog of disease fell over his eyes, and for a moment, he saw not the world but an evil waste that did nothing but spawn the Lestranges and their ilk like flies from the mud.

“These people,” he murmured, “they’re sick. Sicker than Voldemort, even. _He _just wanted to rule the world and live forever.”

“A failure of imagination, I assure you,” said Snape blandly, “not of evil intent.”

Harry’s stomach grew cold. Snape obviously thought these people were delusional, but he hadn’t always shunned these sorts of atrocities. They hadn’t been enough to turn him away from the Death Eaters, at least. The same man who’d loved Harry’s kind, brilliant mother past the bounds of death had also hung out with these sick weirdos of his own free will. For all Harry knew, he _still_ didn’t give a damn about a dead Muggle here and there.

Harry had to know. “So you saw all this—the dead unicorns, the skinned Muggles—and you _still_ joined these people.”

“What?” Snape muttered, turning a narrow-eyed gaze on Harry. “Do I not seem the type?”

“I’m just—trying to understand.”

“Well _don’t.” _

Harry opened another cabinet. Halfway through a shelf of mummified genitals, he remembered that Quirrell had described Snape exactly the same way: _he does seem the type_. But that had been Quirrell’s point—Snape _seemed _like he was, but he wasn’t. He’d been on Harry’s side. He’d loved Harry’s mum. Harry’s mum, though, had stopped loving Snape for a reason. Had those parts of Snape she’d rejected ever gone away?

Snape had returned to his revealing spells. Harry kept on with the cabinets, searching for signs of magic but unsure what he was really looking for; he found a few hexes of the “irritating inconvenience” variety, and the rest of the junk seemed purely aesthetic. He jotted down a few notes and hoped that would suffice.

Snape now stood in the center of the room with his chin in his hand and a scowl on his face.

“Nothing, eh?” Harry couldn’t help a little gloating, forgetting for a moment that as a bloody Auror, he should _want_ Snape to find that hidden door.

Snape ignored him and strode toward the door they’d entered from. A small passage led back to the painted room, and a window inside it afforded a view of the east wing from the outside. Snape paused in front of it, then returned with an air of triumph.

He pointed to the wall at the end of the gallery. “The house extends farther than the length of this room. There _must _be a door.”

“But you checked that wall already, didn’t you? You checked the whole room.”

Snape stood before the mute wall, bushy brows drawn down tight. Then, with great reluctance, he pulled up his left sleeve. He twisted his body to the side, as if to hide what he was doing, and lifted his arm to present his Dark Mark.

The outline of a door emerged.

“Oh,” said Harry, eager to cover the awkwardness, “well done.”

“Was it?” Snape shot Harry a glare startling in its malice, given how nearly civil he’d been for the last half hour. “Off you go, then. Tell the esteemed Mr. Dawlish I’ve done as he asked.”

Harry was so amazed he laughed. “Are you kidding? I’m not letting you go in there alone.”

“What makes you think you can ‘let’ me do anything?”

Harry laughed again. “When you stopped being my teacher, for one thing. You’re not the authority here, in case you’ve forgot.”

Snape’s face had gone rigidly blank. His hand tightened on his wand.

“What are you going to do,” said Harry in amazement, “_attack_ me? Right here? At my_ job?_ With four of my colleagues downstairs—”

Snape lurched forward. Harry blocked him from reaching the door handle, but Snape dodged him, eyes flat with unreasoning anger, and cast a spell at the door. It unlatched and opened a crack.

“Damnit, Snape!” Harry fumbled to point his wand in the close quarters. “Have you lost your mind?!”

Snape snarled, as anguished as the shocked, staring animals on the walls, and tried to shove Harry aside—rather more successfully than he’d meant to, it seemed. Harry couldn’t stop himself from going down, so he grabbed hold of Snape’s robes, and their combined momentum sent them both tumbling through the door.

Tangled together, they fell. And _kept _falling.

Harry hit the ground with his shoulder and grunted in pain. Once they’d rolled apart—with a great deal of kicking and snarling—he looked up to find out how far they’d fallen. But there was no hole in the ceiling above them. Indeed, he didn’t understand _what_ he was seeing. It looked like . . . more floor.

Which could only mean they were _on_ the ceiling.

Harry didn’t _feel _like he was on a ceiling; he felt perfectly right-side-up. Next to him, Snape’s stringy hair still fell to his shoulders. But this was definitely a ceiling—a very ornate one crisscrossed by rows of white moulding that looked like the ruffled piping on a cake. A few feet away, a chandelier stood upright on the flimsy stalk of its chain.

Harry’s mind needed a moment to turn _itself _right-side-up. As his confusion cleared, his anger flooded back, pouring in until his body could barely contain it. He turned to where Snape lay beside him, rubbing his knee. “What—the _fuck_?!”

“Don’t you raise your voice to me!” Snape jumped to his feet. “If you hadn’t got in my way—”

“The same thing would’ve happened!” Harry got quickly to his feet as well. “You’d have run straight into this curse, whatever it is! You love to call _me _reckless and stupid—”

As quickly as a struck match, rage flared back to life in Snape’s eyes. “That _you _of all people would accuse me—but of course! When _you_ rush in thoughtlessly, it’s ‘bravery.’ When I act with confidence founded on experience, it’s ‘carelessness’!”

“Really?” Harry made a hysterical sound too weird to call a laugh. “_Meant_ to get us into this, did you?”

“Do you suppose I’m helpless against the sorts of things that lurk in Dark wizards’ homes?” Spit flew from Snape’s lips. “You have no business telling _me _what to do, I who taught you the most rudimentary of spells!”

“Then let’s see you get us out of this,” Harry shouted. “Go on! Show me how much _better _than me you are!”

“Listen, Potter”—Snape drew very close—“I don’t know when you decided you were free to speak to me like this, but—”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Harry jerked forward, making Snape take a step back. “Maybe when I grew up, and a war started, and we became mortal enemies until you bled to death in my arms and showed me the story of your life? You know—when we defeated Voldemort together?”

“Together? _Together? _Don’t make me laugh!”

Harry couldn’t help it. Only Snape could do this—make Harry too angry to think, without even trying, just by _being himself_.

“Why are you still _doing _this?” Harry leaned on his knees, sweat trickling into his hair. “After everything that’s happened—”

“And what _has _happened?” Snape’s voice was soft and rough, strained with some inscrutable emotion. “When, precisely, was my opinion of you supposed to have changed? Oh, you marched willingly to your death? _So did I_, and I had a lot more time to contemplate it. You _saved _me from Azkaban? I did not ask for it and in fact I resent it. You’re the same empty-headed, self-important child you’ve always—”

“Oh come on,” shouted Harry, “you _know _that’s not true! And if you really don’t get that by now—”

“Listen closely, Potter.” Snape seemed to swell, like a shadow creeping up a wall. “I did not expect you to be here this morning, and if I had, I would not have come, because my dearest wish is to _forget you exist_. You have made my life a burden for seven long years and I will no longer tolerate it now that I am not obligated to do so. Since cruel fate repeatedly insists on thrusting you into my path, the least you can do is _get out of my way!”_

Harry opened his mouth to shout back—that _he _had been minding his own business when _Snape_ had invaded _his _workplace—but instead he blurted, “This is about those memories, isn’t it?”

Snape grew so still and vibrated with so much violent tension that for a moment, Harry forgot he wasn’t eleven years old.

“I believe I told you never to mention them again,” Snape said in his softest, deadliest voice. “But as usual, you have no regard for my wishes. May I remind you that, as I am no longer your teacher, I am free to revenge myself on you without constraint? I assure you, I do not fear Azkaban.”

“And I don’t fear _you. _Don’t know if you noticed, but I’m no longer some helpless kid you can push around—”

_“Harry?!” _Ron’s voice floated up from the floor below—or above. _“Was that you? Where are you, mate?”_

“Ron!” Harry shouted back. “We’re up here!”

Footsteps pounded up the staircase.

“No!” Snape got to his feet. “Weasley, do not come into this room!” At Harry’s outraged look, he pointed at a convex mirror hanging—standing?—opposite the door. “We’re under the effects of a Distorquovorso Jinx, which was almost certainly triggered when our reflections appeared in that mirror. If Weasley comes in, he’ll be stuck up here with us.”

Ron was barreling through the gallery. Quickly Snape conjured a cloth to cover the mirror.

“Ron,” Harry shouted, “in here!”

Ron’s heavy footsteps approached. _“Harry!” _said his voice very close by.

Harry looked around, but—no Ron. Had he not seen the door?

“Ron, where are you? We’re up here!”

_“Harry?” _Ron’s voice had a note of panic in it. _“Where are you?”_

“Up _here_, you berk! Where are _you?”_

The disembodied footsteps faded away.

Harry stood, frozen in place, his mind quietly spinning off its axis.

“Interesting,” said Snape.

Harry spun around toward him. “What—just—_happened?”_

“It appears that we now exist in some form of alternate space.”

“What the hell does that _mean?”_

Snape scoffed. “Haven’t you ever heard of Extension Charms? Magic has limitless potential for altering—”

“Snape?” Harry asked quietly. “Do you, or do you not, know the Counter-Jinx to this Distor—whatever?”

Snape’s mouth twitched. “I do not.”

Harry turned and headed for the upside-down door.

“Don’t turn your back on me, you insolent boy!”

“If I don’t leave this room _right now,_” said Harry, “Ron and the others are going to find bits of us smeared all over the walls!”

By the universe’s infinite mercy, Snape did not reply. He made no move as Harry reached the door and hoisted himself up—down?—to the lintel. It took some effort to get over, and the drop to the other side left him with a twinge in his ankle.

He knelt to rub it. When he looked up, he saw not the gallery they’d come from, but a room he didn’t recognize.

He returned to the door and peered over the lintel. The room he’d left was empty; Snape was gone.

Harry tried not to panic. As much as he never wanted to see the man again— Oh God, what was happening to him? From distant reaches of the house, voices floated up—down? sideways?—calling his name and arguing. He thought he could make out Proudfoot saying, “You sent him off alone with _Snape?”_

Great, now Snape would be blamed for this as well. If either of them were ever seen again. Of course, he thought furiously, this _was _all Snape’s fault. But Snape should at least be blamed for the right reasons—he was an idiot and an arsehole, not an evil maniac.

Harry poked about the room—a dining room full of heavy, pitted, medieval-looking furniture. As much as he hated to admit it, he had to find Snape. Maybe they simply couldn’t see each other outside the room with the mirror, much like they couldn’t see Ron. He climbed through another door, calling for Snape—and found himself standing on a wall this time with his body parallel to the floor, as if the house had rotated another ninety degrees.

_So I guess _this _is a thing now too, _he thought, followed by _sure, why not?—_and looked down just in time to jump aside as a terrified unicorn fled past under his feet. He was back in the painted room.

“Hey, watch it!” said a painted huntsman wrangling a pack of leashed hounds. Harry had stepped on his face.

“Sorry,” said Harry automatically.

As the words left his mouth, the quality of the air seemed to change. It grew cooler, damper, more fragrant, and a breeze touched his neck. The hounds growled—not with the thin, faint voice of a painting, but very real and very close. Pine needles crunched under his feet, and through them, he felt the thrum of distant hoofbeats.

_Oh no._

“Lost, are you?” laughed the huntsman, and led his barking hounds away.

Harry watched him go, amazed at the boundless perversity of Death Eaters. Even the anonymous background figures in their paintings were arseholes.

He wanted to sit down right there, in the path of a dozen hoofed animals running at top speed. What was happening? Was he doomed to wander ever deeper into the branching manifolds of Wizard Space until he dwindled out of existence?

The world of the painting had a misty heightened reality to it, the way he fancied a movie set might feel. As he walked down the cedar-scented path, an ambient knowledge told him he couldn’t go beyond the walls of fog that lay about ten feet on either side. That was good, at least—it was unlikely he’d wander deep enough into the painting that he couldn’t find his way back. He was already lost; the last thing he needed was to get _double-_lost.

With nowhere else to go, he followed the track of the hunt. Several times he had to leap aside to let it thunder past, shielding himself from flying chunks of earth. Luckily the hunters never looked down, fixed eternally on their relentless pursuit.

Harry walked until he reached the tunnel. Up close, he could see it was two rows of trees whose branches intertwined to form an arcade. Although there was nothing particularly menacing about a copse of closely planted trees, Harry knew immediately that he did not want to go in. He could barely see a foot inside, and there was something odd about how the archway was shaped. It was made of tree branches, but it looked more like—like cloth. Like a hood—a dark, empty hood.

With that same spontaneous knowledge, he understood he was looking at a Dementor.

Not a real Dementor, exactly. More like—a sculpture. A symbol, as Snape might derisively put it. But this was a painting; _nothing_ in it was real. Perhaps symbols here were just as real as anything else.

Above the arch floated one of the golden ribbons that followed the huntsmen around. Harry got as close as he dared and saw with dismay that it was inscribed with a Latin phrase. God forbid wizards ever use English. He almost wished they’d taught Latin at Hogwarts, except for how boring it would have been and how bad he’d have been at it.

He sounded out the words: _et anima mortalis est_. Like a diligent little Auror trainee, he took out his notebook and copied them down. If he ever got out of here, he’d consult someone who could read them—Remus, maybe, or God forbid, Snape.

Studying his notebook, though, he found he _did _understand a bit. Did _anima _have something to do with animals? He had a fair idea what _mortalis _meant. Maybe the phrase had something to do with Death Eaters.

The hunt was approaching. Harry jumped back just in time for the unicorn to spring past him and be swallowed by the tunnel’s Dementor-like mouth. He knew he couldn’t beat it to the other end, but he tried anyway, reaching the exit just in time to catch sight of the unicorn disappearing up the path.

Once the tunnel had expelled the hunters, Harry stepped out to investigate this second archway. As he’d guessed, another golden ribbon floated above it. Harry wrote the phrase in his notebook below the other one: _creatio non est propria actio ipsius dei._

Desperate to focus on something other than his strange predicament, he sat on the ground and stared at the phrase. _Creatio . . . _that clearly meant “creation.” Snape had said something about creation when they were searching the cabinets; surely that had to be related. This was, after all, the part of the painting Snape had been so fascinated by. But surely . . . nobody had good enough eyesight to read these tiny ribbons from _outside _the painting. Did they? After that, he couldn’t get very far. _Actio _probably meant “act” or “action,” and he thought he remembered that _dei_ meant “god,” which was strange. Christmas celebrations notwithstanding, Harry didn’t think he’d ever heard a witch or wizard mention God.

The tunnel breathed its menace out at him, black and silent. He couldn’t look into it for very long without feeling as if he were falling, or that he was _about_ to fall, the way you sometimes felt at great heights—as if an alien urge was _telling _you to jump off. The tunnel seemed to think he was _meant _to go inside, to meet his death or something worse.

But gateways to death or not, the archways were also _doors_—no doubt the only ones in the painting. And the jinx seemed to have a thing about doors. What if the archways worked like the other doors had?

Harry would’ve rather done anything than step into that tunnel. But it was that or live out his days as a few flakes of paint on a wall. He was no longer afraid to die, but Dementors didn’t kill you, did they? They did something worse—something Harry had no name for, but that he feared more than anything else on earth.

He closed his eyes and stepped inside.

A pocket of warm, still air surrounded him. When he opened his eyes, he stood at the head of the spiral staircase.

He put a cautious toe on it—he was facing not the steps but their smooth underside—and wondered if he’d be flung into some other, even more bizarre dimension this time. But all he did was slide in a nauseating twist to the bottom (or rather, the top).

The door off the staircase led to a dark, musty room with exposed beams. Harry looked up. Roof beams. _Above_ him.

“Oh thank God,” he said aloud.

“Indeed,” said Snape. Harry jumped half out of his skin.

Snape was straightening his robes as if he’d arrived only moments earlier. “Where’ve you been?” he snapped. “I searched for you everywhere, you incredible twit!”

“Where’ve _I _been? You—” Harry shut his mouth. They might literally do this all day if neither of them chose to be the adult. He sighed. “If you must know, I got stuck inside a painting.”

Snape looked concerned for his sanity. But at least he stopped shouting.

“So,” Harry asked sullenly, “did _you_ wind up anywhere interesting?”

Snape’s face was expressionless. “I spent most of my time lost in a geometric inlaid floor.”

Harry did not ask what that meant and Snape did not elaborate.

The door they’d come through was now a window, and a cursory check around the place revealed no other doors. Harry could only guess they’d found the elusive top floor.

They made the unspoken decision to stay far away from one another. Snape went off exploring, picking curiously through the maze of broken furniture like a cat set loose in a new house, while Harry made his way in at the opposite end. He lit up his wand and scanned for potential evidence as he wedged his body between broken chests and bureauless drawers, but there wasn’t much to see. This junk wasn’t being stored so much as forming a barricade.

He stepped out onto a patch of clear floor and looked up. “Oh shit.”

He was in a little makeshift office. Yellowed hanging sheets and three tall bookcases enclosed a writing desk strewn with loose parchment and a work table stacked with potion paraphernalia.

Harry picked up a loose sheet of the parchment. Every inch was covered in messy notes and scratchy diagrams engulfed by runes and arrows. He recognized the charm to make writing look like gibberish, but from the look of the page, removing the charm wouldn’t make it much more intelligible, at least to him.

When Snape emerged and came over, Harry turned away and busied himself with the work table. Behind him, he could hear Snape leafing through the pages.

“Did Rodolphus write those?” he asked reluctantly, not eager to exchange words with Snape.

“I believe,” said Snape, putting down the notes, “that these materials belonged to Bellatrix.”

Harry tried to imagine Bellatrix Lestrange sitting at a desk, quietly reading and taking notes. The image was so absurd he snorted.

Snape gave him a sharp look. “She was a lunatic, but a brilliant one, and immensely powerful.” He took the notes, shrank them, and tucked them in his robes.

“Hey, we need those!”

“I will have much better luck deciphering them than any of you.”

Harry decided they could fight over that later. The work table was a shambles, but it had clearly been used recently—there was very little dust, and the scattered beakers contained residues no older than a month or two. The jars of ingredients were all empty. Turning away from it, he pulled a sheet off the nearest bookcase and found several shelves of glass bottles, all containing what looked like an identical potion.

“Wishing you’d paid more attention in potions class?” said Snape behind him. “I seem to recall that a potions N.E.W.T. was required for becoming an Auror, but—ah yes, I forgot. Ever the exception.”

“Insulting my potions skills,” said Harry, “how original.”

Snape unstoppered one of the bottles and sniffed it. He frowned and tapped the bottle with his wand. _“Scarpinus Revelet,” _he said, and a scroll appeared in the air. Harry edged closer so he could read it over his shoulder. _Porcupine quills—valerian root—fairy wings—_

“Are those the potion’s ingredients?”

Snape’s lip curled. “Once again, I deplore the Auror Office’s decision to waive their requirements—”

“Can you _please _just tell me what we’re looking at!”

“Yes,” said Snape impatiently, “these are the potion’s ingredients. However, they do not make sense. They are common ingredients for three classes of potions whose effects ought to cancel one another out.”

“Do you recognize it?”

“If I did, would I be telling you this?” Snape dispelled the scroll with an irritable twitch of his wand. “It will take some time to determine what this potion is for.”

“Bellatrix seemed to think she’d need a lot of it.”

Snape stoppered the bottle. “Perhaps it is for inspiring fanatatical devotion to the Dark Lord and giving oneself a mad, staring eye.”

Harry stifled a laugh. Snape’s expression, however, stayed as dour as ever; he looked as if he’d been completely serious. Anyway, Harry had no business laughing at Snape’s jokes; he was still angry. He pocketed several bottles of the potion, spelling them not to break in his pockets, and continued his search.

Aside from a few biting boxes, they found only broken furniture in the rest of the attic—more wardrobes, mostly, dozens of them, some stove in and splintered, all of them empty with their doors hanging open except for one in the corner. It was emitting ominous thumps.

Harry groaned. “How many boggarts does this place have?”

“The one I Banished downstairs may have taken refuge here.” Snape drew his wand. “Stand back, Potter.”

“Fine,” said Harry coldly. He stalked off into the furniture forest, secretly glad to let Snape have his way this time.

The wardrobe door creaked open. Curious about Snape’s boggart, Harry glanced over his shoulder, then turned around, confused by what he was seeing. There was nothing there.

He edged closer. Still he saw no boggart, but Snape had assumed a defensive stance, and his wand shook in his hand.

Harry felt it then. Silence, emptiness, cold. Not the kind Dementors brought with them, but the kind you felt in a very small space.

Snape raised his shaking wand and shouted “_Riddikulus!” _The invisible boggart burst in a puff of gray smoke.

Harry watched the smoke dissipate. “What _was_ that?”

Snape mopped his forehead with his sleeve. “I believe you’ve been taught to recognize boggarts.”

“But there wasn’t anything _there._”

“Occlumency, Potter. The boggart could not perceive my fears and so did not know what form to take.”

That was a lie if ever Harry had heard one. Snape had absolutely been afraid, and whatever had come out of that wardrobe hadn’t been _nothing, _exactly. It had, at least, been a nothing with a presence.

“Well,” said Harry, “I don’t suppose you saw a door anywhere.”

Snape pursed his lips. “No. And before you ask, there’s an Anti-Apparition Charm in place, as you might expect of a secret room.”

While Snape prowled about, Harry sat down on a toppled bureau and stared at his shoes. He wondered if they could search for a way out after he’d had a nap.

_“Harry!” _came Ron Weasley’s faint voice from below.

“Hey!” Harry leapt to this feet. “If the jinx is gone, they can hear us now. Ron!” he shouted. “Ron, we’re in the attic!”

_“Harry?”_ There was some thudding and scuffling, and Ron’s voice came much louder: _“Harry!”_

“If either of you shouts the other’s name one more time,” said Snape, “I will kill you and then myself.”

“We don’t know how to get out of here!” shouted Harry.

_“Can you Apparate?”_

“Tried it! No good!”

“Funny,” said Snape, apparently indifferent to their discovery by Ron. “That wardrobe looks familiar.”

Harry stared at the latticework decorating the wardrobe’s dark-stained doors. How hadn’t he noticed? It was identical to the one in the bedroom. He tried to remember exactly what had happened when the boggart had come out downstairs.

“You . . . didn’t actually Banish that other boggart, did you?” he said, lighting up. “You just shut it back inside?”

Snape grunted an affirmative.

“So?” Harry grinned. “I guess there was only one boggart after all.”

Snape’s brows shot up when he caught on. “I suppose Bellatrix _would_ have another way into her little garret than an unpredictable space-distorting jinx.”

The two wardrobes were Vanishing Cabinets.

“We’re coming!” shouted Harry, earning himself a wince and a withering glare.

Snape swept his arm toward the open wardrobe with a mocking smile. “Aurors first.”

Rolling his eyes, Harry climbed inside and stumbled out into the bedroom, followed closely by Snape, who just managed to keep from knocking him to the ground.

“Ron!” Harry shouted. “We’ve come back!”

❦

Since their disappearance, Gawain Robards had arrived.

“Dawlish thought Snape had abducted you!” Ron told him excitedly. “He sent me to fetch reinforcements from headquarters, but Robards wanted to come himself—I think he was afraid what Dawlish would do to Snape. They argued for like ten minutes, right over there—wish I could’ve heard it. They were both really worked up. Hey, guess what!”

Ron was, in fact, the man of the hour. He and Proudfoot had come across a fireplace in which parchment had recently been burned, and Ron had found a few sheets that had escaped the inferno, lost under a couch. He had hit the proverbial jackpot—several pages of correspondence and a list of what appeared to be financial transactions. Next to that, Harry’s mysterious potion and stack of incoherent notes seemed rather unimportant. He didn’t even bother mentioning the painting or the creepy glass cabinets.

Robards, however, showed great enthusiasm for the notes.

“I’ll take them with me, if I may,” said Snape somberly. “I’m familiar with some of the encryption charms Bellatrix liked to use. I shall study the potion as well.”

Dawlish opened his mouth to object, but Robards said, “Excellent, see what you can make of them, old fellow.” He patted Snape’s shoulder, and Snape gave Dawlish a look of such profound smugness that Harry thought Dawlish might burst into flames.

Snape didn’t leave immediately. While Harry and the others discussed their next steps, Snape lingered some distance away under a tree smoking a cigarette, looking tired and small, hunched and sweating in his shabby black robes as he breathed blue smoke into the summer air.

Everything around them was putting out fragrance under the sun’s heat—lavender and lemon balm and gravel dust, mixing together on the breeze. Above Harry and his friends rose the house’s red brick walls, old and mineral-streaked, exuding the patience of a house prepared to outlast the transitory evils of its inhabitants. The threat of vengeful Death Eaters seemed very far away.

Snape still hadn’t finished his cigarette as Harry prepared to leave. Apparating away, he saw Snape take a drag and tip his head back to release a smoky sigh, as if he were exhaling the cinders of a fire burning him from the inside.

❦

That night, Harry dreamed of Dementors. Hundreds of them, thousands, and facing them, a single unicorn. No—a unicorn Patronus, defiant and brave but overwhelmed by their number, losing more and more ground until the horde engulfed it and came for him at last.

“Harry! _Harry!”_

He opened his eyes. Above him, Remus knelt on the edge of his mattress. The bedside lamp was on, and Remus looked bleary and upset. For some reason, both of his hands were in the air.

“Whassamatter?” said Harry, reaching for his glasses.

Remus dropped his hands. “Sorry. I’ve learned to be cautious when waking people up lately.” He rubbed his face. “You were moaning in your sleep.”

“Nightmare, I think.” He sat up and ran his hand through his hair. “Not the usual, not—flashbacks. Or maybe they were. Stuff I saw in the Lestrange house. There was this painting—of a unicorn, and Dementors. Kind of.”

“Oh, Harry, I’m sorry.” Remus touched his shoulder.

“Too bad Snape didn’t have any chocolate on him,” said Harry, more to get a smile out of Remus than anything.

Remus gave him one, then got a glint of interest in his eye. “I admit, I’d like to’ve seen that painting.”

Harry perked up. “You’ve seen stuff like that before?”

“Just in books.” Remus yawned. “The unicorn is an ancient symbol of the _anima immortalis_—the Soul.” He stood, oblivious to Harry’s thunderstruck look. “Let’s talk about it over breakfast, though, hm?”

After Remus had shuffled back to bed, Harry turned off the lamp and lay down.

_Et anima mortalis est_.

He slept only in fits and starts after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To make room for a change in plans, I made some teeeeny tiny changes to what Kingsley says about Lupin in Chapter Two that I doubt you’ll even be able to spot. (A No-Prize for anyone who does!)
> 
> I based the Lestranges’ house on Eastbury Manor House near London, which was rumored to be the place where the Gunpowder Plot was hatched (although it wasn’t).
> 
> I would like to point out that I intentionally jacked up the Latin in my non-canon spells because that’s what JKR does. So don’t @ me about my Latin, assholes! (I’m kidding. You are all lovely. Unless you really _were_ about to pedantically correct my Latin, in which case, screw you!)
> 
> (Oh by the way, the literal translation of the Lestrange family motto is "the raven doesn't pluck out another raven's eye," i.e. "Lestranges never sell each other out." As for the other Latin phrases, we'll get to those.)
> 
> Finally, now might be a good time to explain the title. It’s from _Doctor Faustus_, a play about a guy who makes a deal with the devil that ends about the way you’d expect. Just before the devil comes to collect his soul, Faustus says something startling:
>
>> O, no end is limited to damned souls!  
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?  
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?  
Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis, were that true,  
This soul should fly from me, and I be chang’d  
Unto some brutish beast! all beasts are happy,  
For, when they die,  
Their souls are soon dissolv’d in elements;  
But mine must live still to be plagu’d in hell.  
. . . Now, body, turn to air,  
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!  
O soul, be chang’d into little water-drops,  
And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found!
>> 
>> (5.2.101-9;113-6)
> 
>   
Make of that what you will.
> 
> **Next chapter:** we find out how Lupin’s been keeping. Spoiler: not great.


End file.
